For a long time I dreamed of being a writer but it took me a while to have the confidence to write a whole novel. When I began, I wrote about everything I love: adventure, mystery, the wonder of the natural world (as well as its darker aspects) with threads of ancient history and folklore thrown in. Someone recently described me as a ‘benevolent forest-witch’!

Books and writing have always been central to my life, so much so that I chose to study English at university. I went to Exeter College, Oxford, which is the inspiration for Jordan College in ‘His Dark Materials’ by Philip Pullman. Amazingly, when I trained to be a teacher, Pullman was one of my tutors and he might even have been writing his trilogy at that time! After qualifying, I taught English at Secondary level and then more recently had the opportunity to work with younger children in a Middle School.