Vera Magpie

 VERA MAGPIE explores the gap between childhood fantasies of adult life and the stark reality of life in a women's prison. The eponymous narrator, Vera Magpie herself, is serving time for the murder of her three husbands, including Larry, a good man whom she loved, but doomed to die at Vera's hands because she has acquired a taste for murder. In prison, Vera experiences the reality that here are politics and a pecking order, just as in society at large, but here also she finds redemption through literature. Like many women who kill, Vera is a product of her own flawed past. But aspects of this past also count towards her early release from prison, as her new female lawyer successfully argues Battered Women’s Syndrome as a defence.

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“Vera Magpie depicts pure life, nothing has been included or excluded, only human attitudes, psychology and behaviours have been condensed.”

—Muhammad Shanazar

“A knockout. This book is a little gem.”

—Jan Needle

“A succinct, clever and multilayered story. I highly recommend it.”

—Ola Rhodes

LAURA SOLOMON was Joint-Winner of the inaugural international Proverse Prize (2009) with her novella, Instant Messages, subsequently published by Proverse Hong Kong in 2010. Also published by Proverse are Hilary and David (an epistolary novel) (2011), The Shingle Bar Sea Monster and Other Stories (2012), the novellas University Days (2014) and Vera Magpie (2015), Frida Kahlo’s Cry and Other Poems (2015), Brain Graft (play, 2017). Proverse has also published second editions of An Imitation of Life (2013), (novel first published by Flame books, UK) and In Vitro (2014) (poetry collection first published by Headworx, New Zealand, 2011).

Of Solomon, Maggie Gee wrote, when Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, United Kingdom, "Witty, clear-edged, both lemon-sharp and seductive, Laura Solomon is a writer to watch."

Solomon published two novels in New Zealand, Black Light (1996) and Nothing Lasting (1997). Her plays have been produced at the Wellington (New Zealand) Fringe Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (UK).

Among other writing prizes, she twice won a prize in the Bridport (UK) International Short Story Competition.Her short story, ‘Sprout’, first published in the Bridport Anthology, 2004, and then by Flame Books in the UK, was translated into Czech by Olga Walló and appeared in krásná in the Czech Republic in 2011.

Born in New Zealand, Solomon spent nine years in London before returning to New Zealand in 2007. She has an honours degree in English Literature (Victoria University, 1997) and a Master's degree in Computer Science (University of London, 2003). She has travelled internationally for her work in IT, including working in Norway, for Fast Search and Transfer, now owned by Microsoft.