Alice McVeigh was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Thailand, Singapore, and Myanmar, where her father was a US diplomat. After teenage years in McLean, Virginia, and achieving a degree in cello performance at the internationally renowned Jacobs School of Music, she came to London to study cello with William Pleeth. After settling in London, she began to work all over the world with orchestras including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, and Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique.
McVeigh was first published in the 1990s, when her two contemporary novels (While the Music Lasts and Ghost Music) were published by Orion Publishing – now Hachette – to excellent reviews, including: “The orchestra becomes a universe in microcosm; all human life is here . . . McVeigh succeeds in harmonising a supremely comic tone with much darker notes.”(The Sunday Times) And: “McVeigh is a professional cellist and is thus able to describe with wry authority the extraordinary life of a London orchestra. This is a very enjoyable novel, and not quite as light as it pretends to be.” (The Sunday Telegraph)
In February 2021, UK independent Unbound published her speculative thriller, Last Star Standing under her pen name, Spaulding Taylor. It received a Kirkus star, and in January 2022 has just made the semi-finals of Chanticleer's Cygnus Award.
Also in 2021, Warleigh Hall Press released Susan: A Jane Austen Prequel. A quarterfinalist in Publishers Weekly's 2021 BookLife Prize, it recently took First Place in the PenCraft Book Awards and the gold medal (historical) in the Global Book Awards. Shelf Unbound magazine selected it as one of the “100 notable indies of 2021”. The BookLife Prize rated it 10/10. (“Pitch-perfect... this Austen-inspired novel echoes the master herself.”) The second of her six-novel Austenesque series – Harriet: A Jane Austen Variation - will be published on Feb. 3, 2022.
Alice is married to Professor Simon McVeigh; and their daughter Rachel is currently studying Chinese Literature at Peking University. When not playing cello, writing, or editing, Alice is generally smiting tennis balls at the Bromley Tennis Centre. (Often too hard. As her daughter acutely observed when aged four, “My mum hits the ball farther than anybody!”)
