Biography

I grew up in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey with my mother and two older brothers. My father was a conscientious objector. He had suffered from colitis for years and died when I was five. I followed my brothers to Sidcot, a Quaker boarding school in Somerset.

I trained as a teacher at the Froebel Educational Institute at Roehampton, and it was while teaching at a London primary school that I met my husband. We moved to Suffolk and I taught until our first child was born. Three more children followed and we found ourselves running a smallholding with goats, chickens, vegetables and fruit.

As my youngest child approached school age an opportunity arose to teach adult literacy at HMP Highpoint. I found it extremely interesting and before long I was fortunate enough to win a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to visit Scandinavian prisons. The experience made me want both to make prison life more purposeful and to help prisons reduce the number of offenders coming back. This sounds obvious now but in the early 1980s few people were thinking about more than containment. Some years later I was appointed Education Officer at a new prison in Cambridgeshire, HMP Littlehey. During my five years there I was also a Cropwood Fellow at the University of Cambridge and gained an MA in Education from UEA.

Then I was appointed to the first contracted-out prison, The Wolds, near Hull, as Inmate Services Manager - ie. an assistant governor. Making a success of this new venture meant a steep learning curve for staff, prisoners and managers. Because of the distance from my family, working there was not tenable in the long-term and I decided to set up as an independent criminal justice consultant. My work included carrying out research, writing training materials for prison officers and developing and assessing practical exercises for police officers seeking promotion. I also had a short spell with the UN Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Department in Vienna, and, most recently, served two three-year terms as an Independent Member of the Parole Board, a fascinating and significant experience.

By that time I was writing poetry and my first novel and I enrolled in the Advanced Writers' course with the Open College of the Arts and was lucky enough to be tutored by Sara Maitland.

I am now a reader and mentor for The Literary Consultancy, work I enjoy greatly. The current focus of my own writing is the completion of my fourth novel whose working title is The Listener. You can find extracts from it on this website.

In 2009 I read at the Literary Festivals in King’s Lynn, Norfolk and at Debenham in Suffolk.

I have also just completed an MA in Writing the Visual at Norwich University College of the Arts (formerly the art school). In researching more deeply about East Anglia I developed an interest in the Vikings and this led to me creating an illustrated concertina art book containing poems about Viking women. Its title is The Other Vikings, and there is more detail about it on the page on poetry.