Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Romford, Essex, UK
• Education—University of Oxford
• Currently—lives in London and on the Kentish coast
In her words
I was born in Romford, Essex, the third of four children. My parents, Peter and Margaret, had moved out of East London some time before, looking for a quieter, more spacious life. They thought of themselves as upwardly mobile, which they were. We moved a lot during my childhood, first to Basildon in Essex, then to a village in Germany, from there Kent, then north to Lancashire, south again to Buckinghamshire and so on. I tried pretty much every kind of school, from German kindergarten through catholic convent to bog standard state grammar.
After graduating high school with a mixture of arts and science A-levels, I won a place at Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics, imagining this combination would give me a grounding in ‘real life.’ Ha! I was soon writing essays on whether I could prove I wasn’t a bat and what might happen to the price of tennis rackets if tennis ball production was moved to Mars.
After graduation, I worked in book publishing, turning to writing at first part-time then full time in my late twenties. Looking back, I wish I’d had the guts to do that when I first came out of university. I always knew I wanted to write but didn’t think that Essex girls who knew how to prove they weren’t bats, and not much else, really stood a chance.
Although I am now a full time writer, I have enjoyed teaching creative writing at Roehampton University in London, at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in the USA and at The Arvon Foundation. After spells living in Las Vegas, Nevada and Nicaragua, I am for the time being settled in London and on the Kent coast.
I have had the extraordinary privilege to be able to travel widely: to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic, to Alaska, Iceland, Madagascar, Mali, Namibia, Ethiopia, Gabon, Malaysia, Russia, China, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico and many other places besides. Place occupies a large part in my heart and in my work.
Currently, I am writing fiction, nonfiction and journalism. I have also written and presented for TV and radio. (From the author's website.)