Sue Wright

Sue Wright is a Londoner, perhaps even a Cockney, since the maternity home where she was born was within earshot of Bow Bells. 

Her studies at Trinity College, Dublin, Westfield College, London, and Aston University, Birmingham led to a doctorate and an academic career. She specialised in language policy – who speaks what to whom and why. And how elites and governments try to mould language practices to create cohesion or to put up barriers. It was a wonderful career for academic tourism and Sue studied these issues in places as far flung as New York, Croatia, New Caledonia, Indonesia, Quebec, Estonia …. 

Her final post was professor of Language and Politics at Portsmouth University, leading a research team. 

Throughout her career she published extensively and after retiring she found she couldn’t stop writing. She turned to fiction which was a steep learning curve. But one she hopes she’s learnt to navigate. Legacy is her first published novel.

Sue is not the only writer in her family. Her son, Tom Wright is author of Billion Dollar Whale, a Financial Times book of the year. Her son-in-law, Mark Stratton, publishes children’s books under the imprint Naughty Bird Books. And his two children have already contributed to the NBB booklist

Legacy (2026)

In 1996, Sam Bellamy, the prominent human rights lawyer, dies unexpectedly, Cate, his wife, is grief stricken. She has lost her twin soul, the love of her life. Then, personal letters among Sam’s papers suggest that someone else in the world is also going to mourn his loss. When his will is found, Cate learns the full truth; her husband had another twin soul, Sophija, a young Serbian academic, with whom he was working to bring war criminals to justice. And a further blow. They had a son. Cate’s grief turns to loathing. Predictably, when she learns that Sophija died in the last Serbian attack on Sarajevo and that the boy is now an orphan, she refuses all help. In contrast, Louisa and Harriet, two of her four  daughters, find they cannot abandon their tiny half-sibling. They set out to search for him in war-torn Bosnia…..

A selection of her academic publications are available on Kindle Books:

• Language Policy and Language Planning: from Nationalism to Globalisation (2004, revised edition 2016) Palgrave Macmillan
• Community and Communication: the Role of Language in Nation State Building and European Integration (2000) Multilingual Matters
• French – An Accommodating Language?: Le francais: langue d’accueil? (2000) Multilingual Matters
• Language Policy and Language Issues in the Successor States of the Former USSR (1999) Multilingual Matters
• Language and Conflict: a Neglected Relationship (1998) Multilingual Matters
• One Country, Two Systems, Three Languages: A Survey of Changing Language Use in Hong Kong (1997) Multilingual Matters
• Language and the State: Revitalisation and Revival in Israel and Eire (1997) Multilingual Matters
• Monolingualism and Bilingualism: Lessons from Canada and Spain
• (1996) Multilingual Matters
• Ethnicity in Eastern Europe: Questions of Migration, Language Rights and Education (1994) Multilingual Matters