In our June 18th xChange Paul Skinner, founder of MarketingKind, will interview Manda Scott, former Scottish veterinary surgeon who is now a bestselling novelist, blogger, columnist and occasional broadcaster, to discuss how storytelling can help us find hope in the climate emergency.

Manda is an advocate of the concept of Thrutopia as a narrative tool for taking actions in the present to create a better tomorrow. And together we will explore how she used Thrutopia in her latest novel Any Human Power.

Manda grew up near Glasgow where she studied veterinary surgery before going on to teach at the universities of Cambridge and Dublin.

She began her writing career with a series of crime novels set in Scotland, the first of which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. No Good Deed, the dark, edgy thriller which followed, was nominated for an Edgar Award and hailed as one of the most remarkable thrillers of the year in 2001.

The bestselling Boudica: Dreaming series came next. Originally conceived as a trilogy, this grew to four books and gained a cult following around the world for its depiction of how we were before the Romans came, of what we lost and how and why. Translated into over twenty languages, these books are still drawing people to the dreaming twenty years after first publication.

The Rome series of ancient world spy thrillers followed: another set of four books featuring the spy, Sebastos Pantera, these began in the years immediately after the Boudican revolt and followed the lives of some of the surviving characters in Gaul and Rome.

Having spent the last two decades bringing historical figures back to life, reimagined and rebooted for the twenty-first century, in the tradition of Kate Mosse and Rosemary Sutcliff, the next two novels combine two time lines: a sharp, fast contemporary thriller interwoven with a historical thread linking past and present.

A Times ‘Book of the Year’, Into the Fire explores the myths – and the astonishing truth – surrounding the life of the Maid, Jeanne d’Arc.

A Treachery of Spies, the semi-sequel, follows in August 2018, taking the contemporary characters forward in their journey while the historical thread unearths the truths, courage and treacheries of the Maquis and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War.

Manda podcast’s Accidental Gods explores a vision for another world.