The daughter of a U.S. diplomat, Alice McVeigh was born in Seoul, South Korea, and spent much of her childhood and early years in Thailand, Singapore, and Myanmar. Returning to the U.S., she lived for a time in McLean, Virginia, while working on a cello performance degree at the internationally renowned Jacobs School of Music. Later, she studied cello with a well-known British cellist and an eminent teacher, who became widely known as the teacher of Jacqueline du Pré. Remaining in London as her base, Alice performed all over the world, most notably with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique, and the Royal Philharmonic.
McVeigh first published two contemporary novels, While the Music Lasts and Ghost Music in the 1990s. The books were released by Orion Publishing (now Hachette). The reviews were spectacular: “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)
Her speculative thriller, Last Star Standing, under her pen name, Spaulding Taylor, was published by UK Independent Unbound in February 2021. It was recognized with a ®Kirkus star and was named a semi-finalist for Chanticleer’s Cygnus Award in January 2022.
Susan: A Jane Austen Prequel was released by Warleigh Hall Press in 2021. It was honored as a quarterfinalist in ®Publishers Weekly’s 2021 BookLife Prize. Equally as thrilling, the book claimed First Place in the PenCraft Book Awards and the gold medal (historical category) 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 McVeigh’s six-novel Austenesque series, Harriet: A Jane Austen Variation was published on 3 February 2022.
Married to Professor Simon McVeigh, Alice can generally be found with a racket in her hand, smiting tennis balls at the Bromley Tennis Center. Meanwhile, their daughter Rachel is studying Chinese Literature at Peking University.
Jane Austen-Inspired Stories
Susan: A Jane Austen Prequel
Harriet: A Jane Austen Variation
Capturing Mr. Darcy (short story)
Contemporary Novels
While the Music Lasts
Ghost Music
Thrillers
Last Star Standing
Nonfiction
All Risks Musical: An Irreverent Guide to the Music Profession