We’re delighted to welcome Sarah Butler and Emma Chapman to the Burgess Foundation to launch their debut novels, introduced by poet and novelist Adam O’Riordan.

Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler is a heart-wrenching and life-affirming novel that explores the relationship between fathers and daughters, as well as themes of rootlessness and homecoming. Sarah Butler lives in Manchester, and as well as writing runs a consultancy which develops literature and arts projects that explore and question our relationship to place. She has been writer in residence on the Central Line, the Greenwich Peninsula, and at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and has taught creative writing for the British Council in Kuala Lumpur.

Emma Chapman’s How To Be A Good Wife is a powerful and haunting novel full of menace. ‘On the surface the book is a highly competent, creepy little chiller, but beneath, like a silent, bolted and half-dark room, there’s a much bigger, equally disconcerting story about the nature of feminine experience. It’s an accomplished debut from a writer who shows insight and emotional power.’ Hilary Mantel, Man Booker Prize winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Emma Chapman was born in 1985 and grew up in Manchester. She lives in Perth, Western Australia.

More at Picador.