Jeannie van Rompaey publishes 'Four hours from London', written in Maspalomas

The English writer Jeannie van Rompaey, who has lived in Maspalomas for nearly 25 years, has presented her latest book, 'Four hours from London', at the Casa Saturninita Art Center. The second deputy mayor and Councilor for Education and Culture, Elena Álamo Vega, and the president of the English Club of Las Palmas, Betty Burgess, acted as witnesses and presenters for the author.

 

 

The novel, a trilogy project that begins with 'New beginnings', is set in Gran Canaria. “When I return from a visit to London and see the Island from the air, I always feel a lump in my throat and a tremor in my stomach. It is an emotional response, because I am returning home,” he says.

 

Writing it has taken him almost 10 years. The author acknowledges that “at first it was a long and rebellious novel” and that her editor “rightly criticized it.” She advised him to shorten it and focus on certain sections of it, but her attempts to rewrite it did not convince her, and she decided to put it aside to write other things. When she took it back, she decided to change the structure and focus on the stories of her characters, to which she gave more time and space.

 

The novel talks about the characters' friendships and breakups and feeds back into the superposition of their stories. Specifically in the bond between Queenie and Ellen, two women who have been friends for fifty years, but both have secrets that they hide from each other; the strange erotic relationship of Gina, a disillusioned artist, with Adam, a gay transvestite and drag queen; and the confluence between Kat, a pleasure-lover and wife of a high-income timeshare manager, and Joanne, a woman with limited income struggling to establish herself in Gran Canaria.

 

“The novel has generated a certain stir on the Island. Readers might think that there is a certain resemblance between my characters and some residents, but I assure you that no character comes from a single person in particular. As a writer I collect personality traits and real life stories to create the characters and give an appearance of reality to what happens, but the characters and events in this novel, as in my other fiction novels, come from fragments of memory of years of observing people,” says the London-born writer, “more time ago than I would like to admit.”

 

The writer grew up in Weston, a town in Northamptonshire. Her father, an RAF airman, died in combat in World War II when she was just 4 years old. She lived with her mother in a thatched hut where they had a shop from which they earned a living. She remembers that customers ringing her doorbell broke her concentration on the stories she wrote, which her mother called “doodles.” That's why, at the age of 10, she plucked up courage and went to the home of the writer Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, in Weston Hall, to show him one of her stories. She keeps the memory of that meeting alive. “He congratulated me on my use of language and particularly on my good ear for dialogue. Since then, the desire to communicate is a need that keeps me writing and publishing my work,” she says.

 

Jeannie van Rompaey confesses herself “an eternal student.” She trained as a teacher and studied speech and drama. She graduated in English philology and modern literature from the University of Leicester. Her life has been dedicated to teaching, lecturing and leading theater and creative writing workshops. She is married to historian and artist TJ. Here in Gran Canaria she spends most of her time painting and writing novels, stories and plays. She writes poetry less, but she does not stop exercising it. She enjoys reading her own poems or those of other authors, and she runs the Poems Out Loud poetry evening at the British Club in Las Palmas.

 

The writer, who recommends writing and reading every day, “stay updated with modern writers and trends,” she says, is the author of the dystopian fiction trilogy 'Oasis', composed of the titles 'Ascension', 'Evolution' and 'Rebirth'. ', and the fictionalized psychological thrillers 'Cara de diablo' (Devil Face), 'Disappeared' (Gone), 'Dibujo de la vida' (Life Drawing) and 'Ruta aerial del Sol'. She is also the author of a dozen short stories such as 'Afternoons at the Keyserlei', 'And Her Mother Came Too', 'Ana Belinda', 'Betrayed', 'Recognition', 'Exchange' or 'The Idealists'.