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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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Top Five Books of 2022

In no particular oder, here are my top five reads from this past year, books that have stayed with me and I know will do for some time. I have three fiction here, one non-fiction and a travelogue. I'm not normally into anything vaguely…
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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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Norwich Writers Rebel and #WordsInTheWild

Inspired by the publication of my poem 'Colourless' with Writers Rebel back in July, along with a friend here in Norwich, we decided to set a local offshoot of Writers Rebel, a collective of writers and poets who could gather together in person…
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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…

Colourless

Last week I had a poem entitled Colourless published by Writers Rebel, a collective of writers under the Extinction Rebellion umbrella who believe in a duty to tell the truth about the climate emergency through the power of words and aim to…

Beneath the Same Sun

I've written a fair few poems over the years, but I've never read one in public before. The thought of these things is often scarier than the reality, and I decided to submit a poem I wrote specially for Refugee Week following a call out for…
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Publication Triumph in Mslexia Magazine

This may not sound very exciting, to have a short 300-word piece of creative non-fiction published in a magazine. But for me, it is a real triumph. Let me explain. I have been subscribing to Mslexia Magazine for about eighteen years, a fantastic…
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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…