about me

I was born in Ely, the heart of the Cambridgeshire fens, in 1973.

I moved to Canterbury to study at the University of Kent, where I completed a combined BA hons in English Literature and Philosophy. In my final year I was goaded and inspired by Roger Hardy, who taught a module on prose fiction. Under his tutelage I completed a dissertation-length novella, which on re-reading is fairly awful, but was good enough at the time to gain me an audience with the Head of English. Somehow I persuaded him to let me invent a creative writing module within my MA in Modern Literature, the pilot of what is now UKC's flourishing Creative Writing Department. I could have done what most aspiring writers in my position did, and gone to study at UEA in Norwich, but I had already fallen in love with Kent and had no desire to leave.

After my MA I took a job as a lowly bookseller in Waterstone's Canterbury, and was lucky enough to find myself in a heady atmosphere of creativity and bookishness, where all of the booksellers had degrees and most of them were budding writers. Here my colleague James Henry and I started a creative writing group, where various dissolute characters sat about on the shopfloor after closing time, drinking wine and discussing the joys of writing fiction.

After a spell at various levels on the Waterstone's ladder I was taken on by the lovely Philip Gwyn Jones, then editor of Flamingo and now at Scribe UK. A two-book deal followed, and A Likeness and The Realm of Shells were published under the new Fourth Estate / Harper Perennial banner.

I married artist and lecturer James Frost in 2002, who I met in my bookseller days. We have a son, Rowan. Unable to escape the lure of East Kent, we now live in Sandwich, whose quaint medieval streets have inspired many artists, writers and traffic jams.