Welcome to my website - I’m Jane Hennigan, and I’m the author of MOTHS and TOXXIC, works of dystopian speculative fiction exploring notions of gender, power, and parenthood.
I grew up in Aldershot in Hampshire and worked as a bartender, shop assistant, mobile phone seller, banana picker, yacht stewardess, and telephonist, all before settling into a career in sales and marketing. Although I had aspirations of becoming a writer, with two children and a full-time job, life was too busy. Also - despite being a voracious reader, I felt I lacked the ability to organize the things I wanted to say and make them sound like I wanted them to sound.
I went to university at the age of thirty-four, studying philosophy and English literature, and there I gained confidence in myself and my writing.
After graduating, I began teaching English and philosophy - nothing makes you more conscious of the nuts and bolts of language than having to stand up and explain it all to a group of unimpressed teenagers.
Squeezing my passion for writing into any spare time I could find, and swallowing a fat dose of imposter syndrome, in 2018 I decided to do a part-time MA in creative writing. It was on this course that I began to work on Moths.
In June 2021 I published my first book, Moths.
I began writing Moths on the 9th of July 2019. Why do I know the date with such precision? On that date, the BBC published an article, “Toxic processionary caterpillar plague spreads across Europe”. That evening I sat down and wrote the opening pages of what was to become Moths. It was a difficult journey to publication, not least because – at almost the moment I wrote those two hallowed words ‘the end’ on my first draft and did a little dance around the kitchen table – there was a report buried at the end of the news cycle about a mystery virus emerging in China.
Toxxic - sequel to Moths
Since then I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that others shared my fascination for a world where the patriarchy was a distant memory, and I revisiting the same world in my second book: Toxxic. This next story follows the few remaining men as they venture, excited but disempowered, out into a world shaped by women. The novel looks at different forms of toxicity, misogyny, misanthropy and the fear of evolving gender norms.