A freelance writer, I’ve been lucky enough over the years to edit a magazine for the RNLI, interview Bear Grylls and follow a bunch of parkour fanatics leaping around Vancouver. My writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Vancouver Sun, CBC radio in Canada and I recently published my first full-length book. Over the past 20 years I’ve written hundreds of articles, copy for web pages, book reviews, blog posts and podcast scripts for a variety of organisations.
I am a curious cat who loves to gather stories. Hence, my writing has included delving into the properties of resin bound paving, the experience of a woman crushed by a log while walking on a beach in Canada and my late father’s experience of being shipwrecked during WW2.
An Arvon course in radio drama tutored by Simon Armitage and Sue Roberts resulted in a 4-minute script which I expanded into a 45-minute drama that reached the top 15% of submissions to Writersroom in 2018. Since then, I’ve written five radio plays, one of which was a winner in the Penfro Short Radio Drama competition.
During lockdown I played host to my family providing me with hilarious content for a blog: mycovid19diary. My post, Going Grombre with Style, was published in a Radio4/Vintage collaboration Letters from Lockdown and another was published on the Mags4Dorset website.
Prompted by a Facebook message from a stranger, I turned detective in 2021 to research the mystery of my late dad’s ordeal as a shipwreck survivor during WW2. With only his name and date of birth, I embarked on a a two-year journey of discovery learning that his ship, the S S Oronsay, was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Sierra Leone. He spent 12 days adrift in a lifeboat.
Dad’s story, The White Feather, was published in March 2024 and is available on Amazon.
In 2023 I shared what I’d learned writing The White Feather with a packed audience at the Bournemouth Writing Festival. My talk, Writing Your First Full-length Book, was so well received I was invited to speak again in 2024 and 2025.
