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I was born in Cairo, Egypt and came to Britain during a very cold winter.  Quite a contrast to the heat of Cairo and my first ever view of snow! My father was from England and met my mother in Athens, Greece during the Second World War, fell in love at first sight and married her at once.  They had to flee from Athens as the Germans were advancing steadily, having already over-run the Northern Greek city of Salonika.  Their marriage was a romantic-tragic story and one I must write some day.

What are the things I love, besides of course, my family and close friends?  Raindrops and roses, brown paper packages tied up in string!...but seriously, my favourite things are in Nature and in the often small, but meaningful personal events that bring one a sense of wonder or laughter and happiness.  The eager anticipation of the varying seasons and their colours and growing things and dying things and the symbolism of it all.  The 'great rondure' as Walt Whitman put it.

You'll find nature plays a large part in my poetry and other writings but I also love art and images, ruins, and the great, passionate love stories, stories about complex and deep feeling women like Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Therese Raquin, Gone with The Wind.  I will re-read these till I die.  However, rather than a romantic I like to think I am a realist and can see both good and bad as a part of the scheme of things. 

Wars are a source of so many stories of heroism, romance, foolishness, stupidity, bravery.  They form a cauldron of experiences for a novelist which she can dip into endlessly. These periods of immense change bring forth the best and worst in us all and the repercussions of those two cataclysmic wars of the last century affect us all today and will for centuries to come much as the Trojan Wars affected the ancient world. My latest novel  TheLong Shadow takes place mainly in the period of World War One and began to take shape in my mind as far back as 1973. I wrote to the British Red Cross Society to ask for information and help in research and collected many notes and ideas together at that time.  However, I abandoned the book at that point for various reasons.  I'm glad I did as both I and my writing needed time to mature.  I've written five novels since and have to agree with this...my favourite quotation...

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.

Ignazio Silone

In 1999, my husband, John, moved to Malvern UK leaving our by now adult son and daughter behind in London where they have their own friends and interests.  There was time now to write something longer and more complex.  I began again on The Long Shadow.  It bears some vague resemblance to my first confused half-formed plot yet once begun it suddenly all took shape and was completed in a year.  The characters and their lives and feelings suddenly sprang to life and the chapters rattled forth as fast as my fingers were able to type.  They had been lying there in my unconscious mind all these years just longing to be born; completing this story was a sense of having made my own Odyssey and fulfilled something very deep and special.