Kit Whitfield

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Kit Whitfield is an English novelist. Her first book, titled Bareback in the UK and Benighted in the US, was published by Random House in August 2006. It has subsequently been purchased by Warner Brothers for an undisclosed six-figure sum, and is currently being adapted as a film called Benighted by director Andrew Adamson.^[1]

Bareback/Benighted is a thriller with a whodunit structure set in an alternative world where most of the population are werewolves - although the word is not used in the story - and concerns the minority status of those who are, because of adverse conditions at birth, born with a disability that prevents them from 'furring up' on full moon nights.^[2] The novel's genre is a debatable question, as it is published by the science fiction imprint Del Rey in the USA and the literary imprint Jonathan Cape in Britain, while being reviewed under various genre classifications including by crime reviewers,^[3] and the author has appeared in The Guardian stating her opposition to genre stereotypes as an overly constrictive way of thinking about literature.^[4] It has received comparisons with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in the The Times newspaper.^[5]

Other short stories by Kit Whitfield were originally published in the Oxford and Cambridge May Anthologies, and have subsequently appeared on her website.

Whitfield has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

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