A farmer’s daughter from Cornwall, I studied German and Russian at Newnham College Cambridge. After training in social work at the Universities of Chicago and Newcastle I started out as a psychiatric social worker before becoming an Oxford tutor. I am now an Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford.
After many publications in social work, psychiatry and psychology, over the last few years I have reinvented myself as a fiction writer. I’ve had thirty short stories published and been listed in several short story competitions. In 2018 my story “The Woman who Slept with a Monkey” won first prize in the Plymouth Short Story Competition.
The first draft of my novel Timed Out (written during a University of East Anglia Certificate course) won first prize in the Writers’ Village Novel Competition and the Writers Billboard First Chapter Competition, and it was on the short list for the Exeter Novel Prize.
My second novel, Makeover, won first prize in the Oak Tree Press annual novel contest and was long listed in the Flash500 novel competition.
I belong to a writers’ group run by Blackwell’s Bookshop and The Oxford Editors, The Oxford Writers Group, Writers in Oxford and The Society of Authors. I am a regular performer at a story-telling club.
I have spoken at several literary festivals, including Oxford, Henley, Thame, Worcester, Hillingdon and Wantage and to a variety of other audiences – at book clubs, library events, pensioners’ groups, Women’s Institutes.
Do contact me if you would like me to give a talk on “Getting Published”, “Is there a Novel in You?” or “Can you turn your Life around at Sixty? Internet dating and writing a book”. I’m now preparing a talk on “Oxford Snobs” to link in with my second novel, Makeover.
