Biography:
About:
Education: Bristol University: English
Career: Worked in publishing and as a publicist at the National Theatre; turned to full-time writing after winning the Elle magazine talent contest; wrote a series of columns for The Independent as well as reviews
Current position/role:
- also writes/has written for:
Other roles/Main role:
Other activities:
Disclosures:
Viewpoints/Insight: Once I would have killed our dog to meet a writer. I still feel like punching the air every time I see Andrew Motion - The Guardian, 19th June 2006
Broadcast media:
Video: Regular guest reviewer on BBC2’s Newsnight Review
Controversy/Criticism:
Awards/Honours:
- Mail on Sunday - John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist), 1994:
- International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and WH Smith Literary Award (shortlist) - Sleepwalking - 1994
Scoops:
Other: Married to Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director Jonathan Myerson
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Books & Debate:
Latest work: Out of breath OCLC17523881 , 2008
Speaking/Appearances:
Current debate:
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Articles: 2008
...no recent articles
- Southwold summers - I first went there when I was eight. For us it was the treat place, the posh place we visited, rather than the place where we actually stayed - 9th August 2008 (Travel)
- My goodbyes on a breath of spring - So, I’m sitting here at my desk on a perfect, bright Sunday and out there it really does look like spring has come - 19th April 2008
- Big as a palace, sad as a prison - She was popular – easily the most popular girl in the class. In our plays, she always played the princess - 5th April 2008
- A lifetime of ordinary dramas - You’d think we’d have enough time to get used to it. Almost 20 years of living right next door. And yet still our relationship with it was slippery and strange - 29th March 2008
- A talk from a tentative teenager - I haven’t lived there in more than 25 years – even my mum finally moved away and left the area - 22nd March 2008
- Everything that’s familiar looks different - I still remember it as a day, a moment, a feeling. A stark, bright morning at the bitter end of December, wedged between Christmas and the new year - 15th March 2008
- Laughing all the way to the South Bank - The first time I ever went to London’s National Theatre, it was just for a drink. In London for the weekend, I was taken by a boyfriend – a man whose glamour only seemed enhanced by the fact that he knew his way around the South Bank - 8thMarch 2008
- Life and death under the Tuscan sun - His stepmother was dying. Looking back, that was exactly how they put it. No vague euphemisms - 1st March 2008
- There’s a message in the bottle - His house was a small one, right next door to ours. While ours was big and Victorian and set back from the road, his was a bungalow with just a small amount of front garden, gravelled over to make a space to park just one car - 23rd February 2008
- Never got used to living in awe of Alice - The city where I went to university was built on tobacco and slave trade wealth. Vast, lavish and crumbling, it teetered on the edge of a gorge, its curlicued terraces spilling down towards the river and the docks - 16th February 2008
- Sad, brown marriages, beige houses - It wasn’t anything special, just a little house by the side of the road, where we used to go and play sometimes. It was small and neat and new-built, the same as several others in the flat, mauve village where we lived when I was 12 - 9th February 2008
- Second home but not second class - When, a few years ago now, we bought our little house on the Suffolk coast – our second home, our sea house, my dream house – it was, my husband said, on one condition - 2nd February 2008
- The look in Camille’s eyes haunts me - The summer I was 16 – that long, parched, UK heatwave of 1976 – we were living in a house in the middle of town; the one with the stained glass windows, Hammer Horror turrets and monkey puzzle tree in the garden - 26th January 2008
- Excitement and Eskimo ambitions - It starts falling somewhere in the middle of French, 16 or 17 minutes before the bell goes for lunch. Slowly at first – forlorn flakes squeezed from a heavy sky – but quickly getting heavier - 19th January 2008
- Waiting for real life to start? - He lived in the flat above a friend of mine, 20 or more years ago. It was a block of serviced flats in South Kensington, London, one of those lonely, colourless buildings with a maroon-suited man on the desk, a cold lump of sculpture in the lobby and a lift which whisked you soundlessly from floor to floor - 12th January 2008
- A sad-grand moment that never came - In the two years since we left our old neighbourhood, we’ve only been back a few times - 5th January 2008
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