Name: Jill Dawson PIXIE
Start: 2026-03-09T17:30:00+00:00
End: 2026-03-09T18:30:00+00:00
Location: Blackwell's Bookshop

Whitbread and Orange Prize-shortlisted author Jill Dawson tells the true story of Pamela 'Pixie' Colman Smith.
About this Event

Pixie

It's the turn of the twentieth century and Pamela 'Pixie' Colman Smith is a young woman of stark contradictions: plucky yet naïve, artistically gifted despite lacking classical training, fascinated by the esoteric but sceptical of the world around her.
After the deaths of her beloved mother and her troubled but well-intentioned father, Pixie finds herself in the complex, political world of fin-de-siècle art, trying to get her stunning work seen and to forge a name and a path for herself in life. Across Jamaica, Devon, London and Brooklyn, Pixie is a novel of epic proportions, a tale of the twists and turns, séances and secrets, successes and devastation, of one young woman's talent, grit and determination.
In Pixie, Whitbread and Orange Prize-shortlisted author Jill Dawson renders the real-life figure of Pamela 'Pixie' Colman Smith, artist, publisher and illustrator of the still-iconic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, in arrestingly vivid detail, breathing life into a story that is instantly knowable, but has, until now, eluded popular imagination.

Jill Dawson

Jill is the author of eleven novels, one poetry collection and the editor of six anthologies of poetry and stories. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a Costa Judge, and taught creative writing in many different settings.