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How to start a new novel

I finished writing The River Days of Rosie Crow a pretty long time ago now. Before that gem of a Christmas present knocked at my door of agent representation back in December, I was spending my time - A LOT of time - sending that novel off…

Just Stop Oil - Criminals or Heroes?

My sixteen year old daughter has challenged me in the past months, asking me why we talk about our concerns around climate change, but never get involved in activism. We talk about it, feel angry, afraid and a whole range of other emotions,…
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Rejection and Acceptance

This is a photo of me back in 2005, when I was twenty-seven years old. I had finished writing my first book, The Poet's Wife (which I called In the Shade of the Orange Tree - this was later changed by the publisher) and my then-boyfriend-now-husband,…
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Yours Sincerely: The Climate Letters

Over the summer, a wonderful poet called Linda France did a call out entitled 'Yours Sincerely: The Climate Letters.' This was an invitation to use our pens and imaginations and continue the powerful work that words can bring to the ongoing…
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Publication of new book: The Sky Within - A Memoir of Sleep

My fourth book (and first non-fiction offering), winner of the Backlash Press prize for non-fiction, has been published! It's not very easy to describe how it makes me feel to finally see this book in print. I've been working on it physically…
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Taking a 'Tech Shabbat' each Sunday

For a few months now, my family and I have been putting our screens away from Saturday to Sunday evening. Everything goes into a locked box (yes, laptops, phones, i-pads, all of it) and I place the key in a hidden place in case it feels too…
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How to Grow a Library

A couple of years after moving with my family to Nairobi (where we lived between 2013 and 2017), I started thinking about the fact that the school my children attended didn't have a library and I felt unhappy about this. A reading culture in…
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The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I realise that I'm pretty good at telling myself - and other people - carefully crafted stories that have endured over a long period of time; stories that I've never thought to question. In my non-fiction book coming out later this year…
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Write to Travel

In my previous blog, I penned a few thoughts around the curbing of my incessant travel habit. As I was writing it, I considered a poetry competition I entered last year with Trip Fiction (a brilliant online resource pairing books with travel).…

This is not an easy blog post to write

✰ Caveat - Before anyone reads a word of this, the following blog is not intended to make anybody feel guilty. Guilt is such a counter-productive, ungenerous emotion. It leaves no space for change, for reflection, for openness. Everybody…