This is the official website of the British novelist and historian Jim Powell.

In January 2021, Jim Powell’s PhD thesis for the University of Liverpool was published as a book by Liverpool University Press under the title of Losing the Thread: Cotton, Liverpool and the American Civil War. More details are available on the Academic page of this site.

Jim Powell’s third novel, Things We Nearly Knew, was published by Picador in January 2018. It is set in a bar in an unnamed American small town, at an unspecified time, with the story told by an unidentified narrator. The paperback edition was published by Picador in January 2019.

His second novel, Trading Futures, was published by Picador in 2016 and related the desperate, and sometimes hilarious, mid-life crisis of 60-year-old City trader, Matthew Oxenhay. His first novel, The Breaking of Eggs, dealt with the impact of fascism and communism on 20th century Europe. It was published in 2010 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) and Penguin (USA).

Kay Powell, Jim’s wife, has had her first novel published, also in January 2021. Then a Wind Blew is a study of the effects of war on women, and is set in the final months of the war in Rhodesia, before it became Zimbabwe.

Jim Powell was amongst the ‘12 of the Best New Novelists’ chosen by BBC2’s ‘The Culture Show’ in March 2011.