Always on the move with my Air Force family, I spent a peripatetic but happy childhood in my book-lined imagination fueled by tales from the past.

I ached to tell stories but struggled to read and write, and it wasn’t until the age of nine when living in Norway that I broke through the barriers. When I did, I spent every spare minute reading everything and anything I could. I loved CS Lewis, Arthur Ransome, the Bronte sisters, and Tolkien.

Day-dreaming took pole position in the life of a nascent author and, without the distraction of television and beguiled by the wide, wild landscapes that surrounded me, I lived between the real world and that conjured in my head.
Hooked on history and literature, I returned to England and a bleak period of secondary schooling where I never quite followed the plot expected of a typical teenager.

A diagnosis of dyslexia gave context to the previous years of struggle. Undeterred, university gave me the opportunity to indulge my love of history and it was where I met my future husband.

Together with our friends, a couple of Siamese cats, and a ghost, we shared a cottage in the grounds of a castle between the confluence of two rivers, and dreamed of setting up a school.

After a career running our specialist dyslexia and autism school in the South East I am now writing full-time in the South-West surrounded by restless seas, ancient landscapes and wild, wide skies.