HOW IT BEGAN

In 2017 a phone call changed my life in the most brilliant and unexpected way...

Having previously dabbled in acting and film development, I had spent the last eight years working in the restaurant business with my brother, Jamie, heading up our brand and marketing department. We have a small group of restaurants, mainly in London, including Hush in Mayfair, the all-day burger brand, Hache, and the Latin American barbecue group, Cabana.

Working with the restaurants was creative and dynamic…and has involved a certain about of writing (including a lot of press releases!), but writing had always been a creative itch I had  scratched on the side.

I have always written in fits and starts, but about five years previously  I had started writing my first serious novel – a very long and drawn out literary fiction piece based on my grandmother’s life in Mandate Palestine, pre-Suez Cairo and post-war London.

I started taking regular classes with Maggie Hamand at the Complete Creative Writing Course, which made me completely rethink my approach to writing, and was invaluable in shaping the way I wrote.

However, in April 2017 I found myself at a complete dead end with my first novel, and, almost as a form of release, starting dabbling with a thriller that had been niggling away at me. I mentioned I was writing it to my mother, and, about a week later, she told me that she had spied a first novel competition that I *had* to enter.

I hammered away at my laptop, completing just enough of the book to be able to enter, and literally handed my entry in on the closing day of the competition (I couriered my entry, so worried was I it wouldn’t make the deadline!).

And then I forgot all about it…

About two months later, preparing for my morning operations meeting, I received a phone call out of the blue.

The phone call was from Luigi Bonomi of LBA Books telling me I had WON the Daily Mail and Random House First Novel Prize 2017

Thus began an extraordinary chain of events that I am still waiting to wake up from on a daily basis. The little thriller I had dabbled away at became MY NAME IS ANNA, and was published by Century, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in January 2019, and went on to be published in North America and Slovakia. 

Ten days after MY NAME IS ANNA was published, my son, Marlowe, was born, vying for attention with the completion of my second novel, OUT OF HER DEPTH. 

Now, I divide my time between restaurants, writing and chasing a toddler in fairly equally measure, meaning my life is very full but doesn’t involve much down time!