Biography

I wrote my first short story at the age of six. It was called "The Poo Squirters" and it was about children who filled washing up bottles with poo and went around squirting their teachers with them. I was never destined to be a writer of decorous, flowery prose, I guess.

My first novel was produced at the age of nine and totalled some hundred and thirty pages, all handwritten in red ink. It was about an orphan and her best friend who ran away and had all sorts of unfeasible adventures. They had some extraordinary luck on their travels, and were fortunate enough to find a large suitcase of food at the bottom of a river in one chapter. My parents howled with laughter when I described how the orphan presented her hungry best friend with a meal. I'd written "Sam severed her friend with a plate of sandwiches." Looking at my stories now, maybe it wasn't a mistake after all. Maybe Sam was just a really inventive murderess.

Having always been almost as keen on reading as writing, I graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1997 with a degree in English. UEA is famous for its creative writing courses and I took as many modules of creative writing as I could cram in alongside the study of literature. I was fortunate enough to be taught by Geoff Dyer, Peter Reading and Margaret Drabble, all of whom gave me frank advice and encoragement. Dyer liked the subtlety with which I portrayed characters and praised my no-nonsense handling of a difficult subject. Drabble congratulated me on the speed with which I worked but pointed out that my male characters acted like girls — I worked through several drafts to inject a lot more masculinity into them. Peter Reading helped me with patience and good humour through my first attempts at poetry, which were pretty awful, and it is not through any fault of his excellent mentoring that I have since left poetry out of my remit.

After spending five years teaching, I left the profession. The amazing variety of colleagues and students that I had contact with over the course of those five years have provided rich material for my imagination. Now that I work nine to five, I have gained serious chunks of time to devote to writing.