I think I wanted to be a writer a long time before I was able to give myself permission to be one.

I grew up in a semi rural estate in North Yorkshire, in a family who had strong connections to their farming ancestry. I grew up in a place where I stepped from my front door and was gone into the fields and the lanes almost immediately. I grew up in a wide glacier-scraped valley that is full of hidden history; an archive of the the people who worshipped, ritualised, worked, hunted, lived their lives here. I still live here, in this valley. I am forty five and have no reason to leave. I left school with four GCSEs, though I was predicted to get much better grades than that. I lived with chronic undiagnosed anxiety by whole life. Exams are not my forté. I have what I think of as a non-traditional route into the literary arts. I did not go to university, I left school at sixteen and woke in shops and factories. I don’t think I even realised university was an option for someone like me. I do, however, have a biomedical science degree (distance learning) a BA in English literature (with the OU) and a MA with distinction in creative writing from manchester met. (distance learning) and about an eighth of a PhD. Learning that working as an academic was something I didn’t actually want to do, took a long time to realise. The journey taught me so much about myself though, and what I am truly capable of, and it led me here.

I used to think being different stopped me from being a normal person, but in fact it led to me having a vast internal life, something that eventually brought me back to books, and writing in my late thirties. It took the death of my very much loved and wanted IVF baby, who died at birth, and the absolute devastation of infertility to undo all the things I thought I needed to be to fit in, to belong. It changed me, and the person I became allowed me to reconnect to myself, and my inner world, and merge them together to this place that I live now – as a writer. I write about belonging, and sometimes grief, and often history and the rich interior lives of women. I write about the way that time is so much thinner than you can imagine and about how people can live simultaneous lives at once, and that is the way that we connect to ourselves. I write about being an animal, a human animal, and how that is so important to acknowledge. Mostly I like to sit in the spaces between the big thoughts and just exist, and my life is about pulling it down onto the page.

I am a poet, creative non fiction author and editor living on the North Yorkshire coast. I am astounded to be the author of six poetry collections including When I Think of My Body as a Horse (winner of the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition 2020). My next collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2024.

My non fiction nature, landscape memoir The Ghost Lake, was long listed for the Nan Shepherd prize in 2021. This led to me being agented with Caro Clarke at Portobello Literary and eventually to landing a book deal with The Borough Press, a division of Harper Collins, which means that The Ghost Lake will be published by them in Spring 2024.

I think of myself as a nature writer, but I rarely write observational poems or prose specifically about nature. However, nature and landscape are so embedded in my work that the first metaphors and simile I reach for are those of the natural world, and my whole life has been lived in a place of wildness and tamed wildness. However, when I turned to the books that I wanted to read about nature and living a rural and semi rural life I found so few that showed the representation of myself as a working class author that I decided to create a platform whose values supported that idea. I am proud to be the founder and editor of print magazine, Spelt, whose mission is to validate and celebrate the rural experience. The magazine publishes poetry, creative non fiction and we celebrate poetry films that explore the natural world too. The magazine is now in its third year. We are currently unfunded, but we are still here.