grew up in a house full of words and books: my mother worked as a librarian and a proof-reader, and my father was a writer.

Every day Dad would go down to the little room he'd built under the house and work on his latest book. If he was writing a children's fantasy, he'd read the manuscript aloud to my sister and me. Those were marvellous evenings--curled up on the sofa listening to another chapter.

In primary school I wrote lots of stories; in secondary school I didn't. English became my least favourite subject and I dropped it as soon as I could. Nothing would have made me take English at university!

I had no intention of becoming a writer. Ever. I got a science degree, I spent several years travelling and working overseas, and one day I was sitting on a bus in Syria, with the desert stretching in all directions, and I thought, What if...

Many years have passed since then, but that what if eventually turned into a manuscript, and then another, and another.

I've been a rehabilitation instructor, a library assistant, a postie, a waitress on the Isle of Skye, and even (briefly) a field assistant in Antarctica. I love to travel and have lived in Sweden, backpacked in Europe, and journeyed overland in the Middle East, China, and North Africa. Most recently I've lived in Marlborough, New Zealand.