I grew up in Bristol, or to be more precise in a village called Pill, which supplied the city with its pilots and still does. Every Saturday morning we would drive into Bristol over the Clifton Suspension Bridge to roam the bookshops and walk along the harbour to the Watershed, or to look at the SS Great Britain, then under restoration.

I read English at Oxford and became a lecturer after writing a doctoral thesis on eighteenth-century fiction. Having raised my three children, I studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, and I was long listed for the Mslexia Novel Prize in 2017 for a manuscript based on my dissertation.

I live and work in North Essex, and I’m currently writing a sequel to my debut novel, A Pair of Sharp Eyes.