I’m a YA author. My latest books are YA thrillers Love You to Death (coming 13 April 2023) and You Can Trust Me (2022) and twisty fairy tale retellings Good Enough to Eat (2022) and All The Better To See You, a Red Riding Hood whodunnit (2021). These four are published by Scholastic. I’ve also published three teen thrillers with Macmillan – Pretty Twisted (2011), Forget Me Never (2012) and Saving Silence (2013).
I grew up in Finchley, North London, with my parents, brother and many greyhounds. I was a total teachers’ pet, spent most of time in imaginary worlds and exhausted the contents of all three local libraries. My favourite authors then were Tamora Pierce (fantasy about kickass girls), Elinor Brent Dyer (schoolgirl stories – I dreamed of going to boarding school, even though my lack of sporting ability would have made me firmly unpopular) and pretty much any mystery or fantasy writer I could get my hands on.
This bookishness led to me studying English at University, where I acquired the very useful life skill of being able to cook pasta with pesto and participated in musicals in which I was always cast as “tall girl at the back” – i.e. hidden away where no one could see/hear me.
My writing story began earlier than I can really remember: I always loved creating stories, either by myself or with friends or my brother, and started writing properly aged about nine. One of my first ‘books’ was an epic 36 A4 notebook story featuring thousands of characters, as well as countless “spin off” diaries of characters I particularly liked. It started as a satire about a girl at school my friend and I disliked, for reasons I can no longer remember! After that I wrote a fantasy novel about elves (containing every fantasy cliche possible), a sci-fi novel, another fantasy tale, a story about fantasy characters transported to modern day earth, and also for years posted in an online Sailor Moon RPG (look it up). After university I decided to try something contemporary. That book became my debut, Pretty Twisted.
Outside of writing, I worked in education for seven years giving advice and guidance to teenagers about higher education and also organising events, which are great for stealing biscuits from (least popular: ginger nuts, most popular: anything with chocolate in). Before that, I worked as a freelance proofreader, an evening receptionist, for a tourism and conservation organisation, and even in the bankruptcy service. These days, as well as writing, I’m also an editor.
I enjoy creating artwork (some of it story inspired), cooking things more complicated than pasta with pesto, watching programmes about crime/cooking/people wearing sequins, Clubbercise and attending my monthly book club. I live in Essex with a husband who shares a name with a Pretty Twisted character, two bookish little boys, and my imperious feline overlords, Nicky and Toby.
I am represented by Lydia Silver at the Darley Anderson Children’s Book Agency.
Photography by Paul Cudmore Photography (top), Colchester Streets (bottom)