Rachel Meller
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Rachel Meller

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Rachel Elizabeth Meller grew up near London, England, the middle daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees who escaped Hitler in the late 1930s. After studying Neurobiology at the University of Sussex and research into hormones and behaviour at Cambridge University, she became a medical writer in a Cambridge-based communication consultancy. She retired early to write her first book, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp, about her Viennese family’s escape from the Nazis to the unlikely haven of Shanghai. Published in May 2023, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp was shortlisted in June 2024 for the Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Bland Prize. Although she did not win, Rachel is comforted to know that she’s in excellent company: Bonnie Garmus of Lessons in Chemistry fame was a runner-up in 2023. Rachel is currently working on a companion book, following her mother’s flight from Nazi-run Vienna to Paris and then London. This account of Ilse Epstein's tragically short life has become possible through a set of previously unseen documents and correspondence, which now completes another side of the family's tumultuous story. It also describes the role of a genteel Quaker philanthropist in saving Jewish refugees. Without the tireless work of this woman, Rachel would have no family story to write. Rachel is represented by Katie Fulford of the Bell Lomax Moreton Literary Agency.
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