I also worked in Russia and Ukraine for ten years, which gave me ideas for the plot and setting that I used in A Friend in Deed. Although somewhat overtaken by recent events, I think it still remains an entertaining read.

I now live in East Sussex, not far from Biddenden in Kent, which is the setting for my latest novel, The Maids of Biddenden, set in the 12th century. My  next novel is also historical fiction, set in Kent in the 16th century.

I became a full-time author in 2016. My writing was placed third in the Lightship Prize for first-time authors and has won a 2016 Wishing Shelf Award Red Ribbon, been shortlisted for the 2021 Impress Prize, longlisted for the 2017 UK Novel Writing Competition, the Wishing Shelf 2018 awards, the 2020 Page Turner Writer Award, the 2021 Flash 500 Award, the 2021 Cheshire Novel Prize and the 2021 Exeter Novel Prize.

I went to Glasgow University in 1975 and lived in the city’s West End, the time and place for the setting of the majority of Love’s Long Road and Silent Money.

Glasgow was a very different city back then and it was not until the 1980s that the city’s cultural renaissance started to happen. I've kept the Student Handbooks for each year I was at university from 1975 to 1978, which outlined to new students the social and cultural opportunities in Glasgow as well as providing a snapshot of the values and issues of the time. They provided invaluable source material for the setting of my novel and it is fascinating to compare the world described in these handbooks with the vibrant, cosmopolitan and sophisticated Glasgow of today.