About

I was born in Kent in 1967 and moved to Scotland in 1985 where I studied English Literature at Edinburgh University. After graduating I combined various part-time jobs (ushering, waitressing, promoting play-buses, indexing articles about farm animals) with  writing poems and stories. I went away to live in Argentina in 1994 where I wrote  most of my first story collection, ‘Sea Monster Tattoo’.  This was published by Polygon in 1997 and was followed in 2000 by another collection, The Dance Settee. My three children were born between 2001 and 2006 and I wrote whenever I could but it took longer… my first novel, Things to Make and Mend, was published by Faber in 2007. My latest story collection, Super Girl (also Faber), was published last November (2009).

I love writers who look at things in close-up, the way poets do; who explore the small-scale, knowing that small does not mean trivial.  Writers with extraordinary voices who talk about ordinary things …   Grace Paley, Jean Rhys, Alice Munro, Katherine Mansfield, Lorrie Moore, Shena Mackay and Muriel Spark are writers I love for these   reasons. I also love picking up a book by someone I’ve never heard of before, and being gripped.

I’m working on a second novel at the moment. I live with my husband and children near Edinburgh’s Caledonian Canal.