Things I Love
slippery black cats, the first sip of champagne, The Big Purple Ones, a book that makes me cry, George Clooney from the front, crispy skin on roast chicken, the horizon, the taste of sea on my skin, the smell of paper and ink in the tight binding of a new book, generosity of spirit, ‘Dirty Dancing’, waking to a blue sky and knowing it will be there all day, and the next, my first Victoria’s Filet Mignon, medium-rare, at Outback’s on Linton after I land at Miami and drive up I-95, laughing ...
Things I Hate
stepping on a snail in the dark, defrosting the fridge, newspaper print on my hands, tripe, mosquitoes, paper cuts, mean-spiritedness, burnt out cars on the motorway, unresolved arguments, a telephone waking me up, rats walking past the backdoor, getting up at five to drive to the airport, chewing gum stuck under a table, sloppy white in a boiled egg, someone being sick in the seat next to me, Andy Williams singing, I can't keep my eyes off of you, a cat dying in my arms, lies ...
Other Things
I was born and grew up in Port Talbot, South Wales, UK but left in 1978 to work in offshore banking in Jersey, Channel Islands. I moved to Kent, UK in 1985 where I opened and ran my own second-hand and antiquarian bookshop, Foxed & Bound (which would become the inspiration for my novel The Oven House), for twelve years.
I began writing in 1988 after discovering Nathalie Goldberg's book, Writing Down the Bones, obtained my Master's degree in writing from the University of Glamorgan in 1996, received an International Hawthornden Fellowship in 2003, and was awarded the University of Kent's Faculty of Humanities Award in 2004 for innovative and imaginative practices in the teaching of poetry.
Since 1988 I've travelled around, living for different periods of time in Florida, Barcelona and in Antibes in the south of France, but I'm now based in Kent again, with my husband, the artist Tony Crosse, in a house at the edge of an apple orchard not far from the North Downs.
