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Lucy Ashe is an English teacher at a school in London. After training at the Royal Ballet School, she decided to change career plans and go to university. She studied English literature at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, before receiving her teaching qualification. Ashe's poetry and short stories have been published in a number of literary journals, and she was shortlisted for the 2020 Impress Prize for New Writers.
Lucy Ashe's website
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Tell us about the inspiration behind The Dance of the Dolls.
When I was training at the Royal Ballet School, I developed a fascination for not only the stories of ballets, but also the history of their creations. The Dance of the Dolls is a novel emerging out of years of research and personal experience and I sometimes feel as though I have pulled together the threads of what I love most in my life to create my debut novel.
My novel reimagines the early years of the Vic-Wells Ballet company at Sadler's Wells theatre, and the story is immersed in ballet history featuring famous historical figures such as Ninette de Valois, Lydia Lopokova, Constant Lambert, Alicia Markova, and Nicholas Sergeyev. I loved engaging with this important time period when British Ballet was starting to grow, integrating historical details into my fictional story.
How did your experience at the Royal Ballet School inform the research behind the novel?
My eight years first as a junior associate and then at White Lodge, the Royal Ballet's School in Richmond Park, had a huge influence on the novel. To spend those years living and breathing ballet, to define myself entirely as a ballet dancer, was both wonderful and challenging in equal measure. There ...
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