I grew up in Potters Bar, a small town in Hertfordshire. At school, I spent my lunch hours in the library under the guise of ‘doing homework’ but mostly reading novels, often of the Sweet Dreams variety, a series of American love stories for young adults with which I was perennially obsessed. After A-levels I left school to study fashion journalism at the London College of Fashion, where highlights included gatecrashing Paris Fashion Week and making an 80s-inspired catwalk outfit out of tissue paper. I spent the following few years interning at various magazines and newspapers while - less glamorously - working in Dorothy Perkins on a Saturday and at a motorway service station on a Sunday!
I’ve had lots of different jobs over the years, from fashion assistant on a magazine (yes, all that work experience eventually paid off) to researcher on a home shopping channel and PA to a plastic surgeon. And somewhere in amongst all that, I pursued my lifelong dream of becoming an actor and went to drama school for a year. Although I graduated full of hope and enthusiasm, the realities of the business were harder than I’d imagined - when I met new people I held my head up high and told them I was an actor, but in reality I was working 9-5 as an office temp.
BIOGRAPHY
When I eventually accepted that the acting career I’d dreamed of probably wasn’t going to happen, I began to think about what else I could do. I’d always wanted to write a novel, but thought that was just as unlikely as being an actor. Why on earth would I want to set myself up for yet more rejection? I enrolled on a writing course anyway, and then another one, until finally I had the beginnings of the novel that became UNCOUPLING/THE PARIS CONNECTION. In 2016 the manuscript was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award, which gave me the confidence and the push I needed to carry on. At the time I was working as a secretary at a school in North London and with dreams of being a published author spurring me on, I spent every lunch hour writing in the café at Waterstones Hampstead. In 2018 I was chosen as one of 11 mentees on Penguin Random House’s WriteNow programme and worked with an editor on the novel for a year, eventually signing with my dream literary agent in the summer of 2019.
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