Welcome to my website.
I am an author, musician and speaker from Havelock North, New Zealand. I’m married to Paul and we have four sons, who have been been generous and unsuspecting contributors to all aspects of my writing.
I also credit many of my ideas to my childhood, growing up as one of nine children. Writing is like foraging; it’s all there if you’re prepared to hunt for it.
My novel, Snakes and Ladders, won the young adult section of the Children’s Choice Award in the 2013 NZ Post Book awards. It was short listed for the LIANZA awards in 2013.
Short stories, flash fiction, articles or blogs are also some of the things I love to write.
Music was at the heart of my world growing up in Hastings. Each of us learned two musical instruments and the choice of instrument for each individual was influenced by the ‘gaps’ in the family orchestra. I was persuaded (today that would read, pushed) towards the cello and although I still play cello, it is the guitar, that won my heart. Teaching and performing are a big part of my everyday life.
Books were the other major influence in my childhood. I was an avid reader with a keen imagination. I was strongly influenced by war stories, especially tales of resistance fighters. If I couldn’t find war stories, I wanted real-life stories about teenagers, and those books were hard to access. There was no category called ‘young adult’ when I was a teenager, and anything really gritty had a gatekeeper standing over it. Perhaps that is why I’m drawn to write for that genre now.
In this interview, I talk about growing up in a large family, writing books for young people, and my second book ‘Coming Home To Roost’.