My Childhood:  I was born in Leicester, and grew up in the countryside in King's Lynn, Norfolk. I was the youngest of three children and lived in a normal noisy household with a lively beagle that no-one could control (except myself, at the age of 7) a stray cat called Brandy (who promptly had 5 kittens after she followed me home from school one day.) As a child I read constantly, and wrote numerous first chapters of unfinished novels, which all ended up under my bed in cardboard boxes. I loved Enid Blyton, and many of the books I read as a child still make a big impact on me now.  Some of my favourites were:

Midnight is a Place, by Joan Aitken,

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

The Borrowers, by Mary Norton

Ballet Shoes for Anna, by Noel Streatfield

World's End, by Monica Dickens

Wuthering Heghts by Emily Bronte

I was lucky in that my parents just let me get on with it, never interfered, and always made encouraging noises when I switched the TV off and demanded that everyone should listen to my latest creation.  I could interrupt most TV programes like this, except the news, Match of the Day, and the Morecambe and Wise Show.

On Saturday mornings when my family went shopping in King's Lynn, they would leave me in the local bookshop, Maureen Primes, come back an hour later, and find me still standing there reading.  I would put a marker in the book, and return the next week to carry on where I'd left off.

At the age of sixteen I won the W H Smith Young Writers Award, and was one of the top ten winners out of 33,000 entrants.  At nineteen I went to King's College, London, and as soon as I finished my degree I took part-time jobs in bookshops/libraries and wrote the rest of the time. In Edinburgh I found work with a literary agent, and have continued to work free-lance ever since. 

In 1995 I moved from London to Dunblane, Scotland, with my son who was a year old at the time.  We lived on Sheriffmuir in a remote cottage, and this provided the inspiration for Chill.  My daughter Martha was born while living there, after a winter of blizzards. I wrote the book after we'd left Sheriffmuir, partly because I missed it and wanted to recreate it in my head.  My children were still quite young, and I snatched time in between school and nursery hours, or wrote in the evenings after they were in bed. 

My parents died just after my first novel Chill, was published.  They enjoyed the story very much. The sequel, Shiver, is dedicated to their memory.