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<meta name="Date" content="23 October 2023"/>
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<h1 id="features_header">Hearts and minds</h1>
<p id="article_info"><span>Published 23 October 2023</span></p>
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<p>Cambridge academic Rosy Thornton set aside her law books to pen a romantic comedy on asylum seekers. Why?
</p>
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<p>
<span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="firstwords">nyone stumbling across a list</span> of my books on Amazon might wonder if there has been some mistake.
</p>
<p>
My new book, <i>More Than Love Letters</i>, is a romantic comedy, complete with hearts and butterflies on a baby-blue cover. But my backlist features the rather less emotionally charged <i>Property Disrepair and Dilapidations: A Guide to the Law</i>. Not so many butterflies there.
</p>
<p>
From housing law to chick lit would be a leap for any author – so how did it come about? As part of my day job as a law lecturer at Cambridge University I write articles for academic legal journals on housing and homelessness law.
</p>
<p>
In 2005, I was sitting down to write another, this time on women asylum seekers escaping domestic violence in their home countries, and how their problems are ignored in asylum law. But then I thought, who will actually read this? A couple of dozen legal academics and maybe an enlightened law student or two?
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<p>
So instead, I started a novel centring on a women’s hostel and highlighting asylum and gender violence, as well as other issues facing homeless and marginalised women, including psychiatric illness and childhood abuse. Peg it to a tale about a woman campaigner (beautiful and ebony-curled, naturally) who falls for a sexy MP, and bingo.
</p><p>
<img src="../images/features/inline263/201009_rosythorntonbook_inset.jpg" class="inline_image_263" alt="" width="263" height="383"/>
</p><p>
Light fiction has a wider readership than legal journals or, indeed, <i>ROOF</i> magazine. Having been involved with Shelter for 25 years, I have done my share of conventional awareness-raising. As a member of a local Shelter group I lobbied and leafleted (unsuccessfully) against the abolition of rent control in the Housing Act 1988. I wrote a research report for SHAC in the late 1980s on youth homelessness and changes in benefit rules. For ten years I was active in the voluntary sector, helping run a hostel for single homeless women, and taking part in the campaigning that entailed.
</p>
<p>
All of this work – the sort that many <i>ROOF</i> readers are involved in day to day – is invaluable and has to carry on. Just as, undeniably, legal textbooks on property repairs are vital to tenants and their advisers.
</p>
<p>
But it’s useful sometimes to take a step back and think of imaginative ways of getting the message to new people.
</p>
<p>
There is a great tradition of fiction being used as a vehicle for raising awareness. The place of Jeremy Sandford’s play <i>Cathy Come Home</i> is, of course, unique in the history of housing law, triggering an intense public debate about homelessness which gave impetus to the launch of Shelter and led, just over a decade later, to the enactment of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act.
</p>
<p>
I am sure, too, that many <i>ROOF</i> readers will know Alexander Masters’ brilliant <i>Stuart: A Life Backwards</i>, which tells the story of a young homeless man in Cambridge. Both are examples of stories which, by engaging the emotions and relating the general policy to an individual’s circumstances, convey important messages to a wider audience.
</p>
<p>
My own book is not aimed at people who have even a passing interest in homelessness. My Cambridge colleagues may well look down their noses at a don who spends her evenings writing romantic fiction.
</p>
<p>
But wrapping up subjects like this in a chick lit format might well bring the issues to a new audience – one that might never otherwise give a book on homelessness a passing glance.
</p>
<p>
<i>Rosy Thornton is an author, lecturer and fellow in Law at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.</i>
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<p><strong>Tags: </strong><a href="../opinion/tags/tag/homelessness" title="homelessness">homelessness</a>, <a href="../opinion/tags/tag/legal" title="legal">legal</a>, <a href="../opinion/tags/tag/asylum-seekers" title="asylum seekers">asylum seekers</a>, <a href="../opinion/tags/tag/Shelter" title="Shelter">Shelter</a>, <a href="../opinion/tags/tag/homelessness" title="Homelessness">Homelessness</a>, <a href="../opinion/tags/tag/Shelter" title="shelter">shelter</a>, <a href="../opinion/tags/tag/literature" title="literature">literature</a>, <a href="../opinion/tags/tag/law" title="law">law</a<>
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