Edith Birde is the pen name for two sisters who have been writing together since their early teenage years.

Their debut novel, Because I Killed Him, drew inspiration from travels across Europe, an interest in history,

architecture, technology, political theory, philosophy, foreign languages, and the Jazz Age. They live in South Africa.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Nine Gentlemen will be a five-book series.

Given that Because I Killed Him is a longer novel, we knew early on that pursuing traditional publishing would likely require significant word count reductions. Those kinds of cuts would have changed the story’s structure and limited our ability to develop the later books planned for the series. Rather than compromise the narrative, we chose not to query literary agents and instead moved forward with self-publishing from the beginning. Our hope is that if readers connect with the story and it continues to grow, there may one day be opportunities for traditional publishing to revisit the book on its own terms, length and all.

We chose to publish under a pen name for a few reasons. First, given that we have husbands and children, we value a clear boundary between our private and professional lives. Second, we are both deeply introverted, and our creativity thrives in seclusion. There’s a freedom in anonymity that allows us to write more honestly and boldly. But more than anything, we’ve always been drawn to the idea of letting the work stand apart from us. Without a face attached, the story belongs entirely to the reader. It becomes something more personal and hopefully more immersive.

If you’d like to know who we are, you’ll find us in the pages. We very much exist there.

Our designer is an extremely talented, hard-working artist named Kostis Pavlou. He designed our book cover, book interior, profile picture, and various images for our website. You can find Kostis’s Instagram at the link here.