Caroline Cauchi author page

Caroline Cauchi biography

Caroline Cauchi is a British novelist and academic who writes historical fiction centred on women whose stories have been overlooked or marginalised. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Hull and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Cauchi also publishes as Caroline Smailes, the name under which much of her earlier experimental fiction appeared.

Her first novel, In Search of Adam, was published in 2007. Writing as Caroline Smailes, she went on to publish novels, novellas, short fiction and a libretto. Her novel The Drowning of Arthur Braxton was adapted as a feature film starring James Tarpey and Johnny Vegas. The adaptation won Best UK Feature at the 2021 Raindance Film Festival.

Cauchi began publishing historical fiction under her current name with Mrs Van Gogh, released by HarperCollins in 2023. The novel focuses on Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the wife of Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, and her role in preserving and promoting Vincent’s work after the deaths of the two brothers.

Her next historical novel, The Woman Who Went Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel, was published by HarperCollins in 2024 and appeared in North America as Queen of the Mist. It reimagines the life of Annie Edson Taylor, a former schoolteacher who in 1901 became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Daughter of the Titanic, published by HarperCollins in April 2026, takes as its central figure Helen Melville Smith, daughter of Titanic captain Edward J. Smith. The novel explores how her father’s death and the continuing public fascination with the disaster shaped the story attached to her family across the decades.