About Me

When I was growing up, my parents worked at an environmental studies centre in the South-East of England. We lived there too, so my sister and I had free range of the centre grounds and the fields and woods surrounding them, where we used to roam around making up complicated games involving home-made bows and arrows, invisible dogs and all manner of melodrama. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that when I was 13, I decided to write my first ever novel. I penned large parts of it in maths lessons with my notebook hidden under my work, and as a result, still have to count on my fingers if anyone asks me to add anything up. I also used to scare my English teacher by handing in 30 sides of A4 whenever he asked us to do a creative writing project. (This is not an exaggeration - sorry, Mr G!)

After I escaped school, I went to university to study art, but I never stopped thinking about my stories and after getting a much better grade for my dissertation than my painting, I decided to pursue writing as a career. I tried all sorts of stuff, from short stories to crime and everything in between, until I finally decided to have a go at writing for teenagers. As soon as I started my first YA novel (now quite rightly relegated to the back of a wardrobe), I knew this was the genre I wanted to write in, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.

Nowadays, I live in the North East Midlands with my husband, a painter and printmaker. You can see his work at www.duncanpass.com. In 2009, we adopted The Hound from the Retired Greyhounds Trust. Sadly, he passed away at the end of November 2012, but we feel honoured to have shared our lives with him, and will never forget him.

Typical Hound position!

Now, we're minions to another RGT hound called G-Dog, who is proving himself to be a worthy successor to The Hound. Isn't he cute?

Biscuit plz.

Thank you for reading my blog - I hope you enjoy it!