Lane Ashfeldt grew up in Ireland and England, and has lived and worked in several European countries. She is working on a collection of short stories. Her ambition is to live in the past; somewhere sufficiently far back for there to be no mobile phones or speaking buses, but not so far back that chalk gets passed off as food. Information about areas of Europe with permanent network voids gratefully received – contact Lane via her website www.ashfeldt.com.
Esther Bellamy is 28 and lives and farms in Hampshire. She read history at Oxford and worked at the House of Commons before studying land management at Cirencester Agricultural College. Between chasing beef cattle and avoiding paperwork she is studying for a Masters in Research in English at Southampton University where she is writing her thesis on the concept of failure in the novels of George Eliot. She is working on a novel. She reads omnivorously and a trail of destruction at the back of her house indicates that she may recently have taken up gardening as a hobby.
Kelly Brendel was born in 1989 in South London. She is currently a student at the University of York studying English Literature.
Suzy Ceulan Hughes was born in England but has lived in mid-Wales since 1977. She is a writer, translator and book reviewer. This is her first short story to be published.
Beth Cordingly was born in Brighton and attended Birmingham University where she gained a double first in English and Drama. She is currently doing the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. She is a founding member of Nomads, a writers’ workshop and of Lou’s Crew, who are working on a comedy series for television. She is an established television and theatre actress.
Felicity Cowie is a former BBC Panorama journalist and a student on the MA in Creative Writing course at Bath Spa University. She is currently finishing her first novel and wrote ‘One Character In Search Of Her Love Story Role’ whilst developing the central character of Hannah Peel.
Felicity was longlisted for the Fish International Short Story Prize 2006 and, as a teenager, won the WH Smith Young Writer of the Year Competition. As a journalist, her most interesting guest was Buzz Aldrin.
Elaine Grotefeld was born in Montreal, Canada and grew up in the UK, where she read English at Jesus College, Cambridge. She wrote two of her dissertations on her favourite writer, Jane Austen (the second to attempt reparation for the first). Since then she’s lived and worked in London, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Singapore – where she ‘headhunted’ technology executives by day and wrote poems, short stories and her novel by night. Happily squeezed between mountains and sea, Elaine is now back in Vancouver – with her Scottish husband, two children, and the occasional rummaging bear. Persuasion’s theme of long-lost love inspired Elaine’s short story ‘Eight Years Later,’ as well as her first and almost-cooked novel, Meeting Joe McManus.
Jacqui Hazell was born in Hampshire in 1968. She studied textile design at Nottingham and has had a range of humorous greetings cards published. She has also been a runner-up in the Vogue Talent Contest for young writers and worked briefly as a secretary at Buckingham Palace. She is a journalist and magazine editor and is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Her first novel is entitled, The Flood Video Diaries. She lives in London.
Elizabeth Hopkinson usually finds her imagination veering towards the fantastic, and is therefore very pleased (and a little surprised) to find herself doing so well with a (nearly) straight story. She lives in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where she finds an endless source of inspiration in the coffee shop in the old Wool Exchange. Her stories have appeared in several genre magazines, webzines and anthologies, and her themed collection of 12 short stories, My True Love Sent to Me, is available from Virtual Tales. Her website is: www.hiddengrove.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Mary Howell was born with many advantages, most of which she turned her back on.
Educated to be a lady at a private convent, she excelled at truancy, managing only to achieve a fistful of star A levels. Her university career and her nursing career both ended abruptly with spells in prison. Both times she was released without stain.
She has lived all over the world, with as many aliases as lovers, She has been an orthodontist’s assistant, a serial absconder, sawn in half by a magician and a happily married mother of three. She now lives in North Wales.
Clair Humphries graduated with a BA Hons in English Literature. She has worked in the Official Publications Reading Room of the British Library and is currently employed at a London university, where she provides support for disabled and dyslexic students. She writes humorous contemporary fiction and lives in Kent with her husband, Steve.
Kirsty Mitchell is 25 and was born in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. She now lives in Glasgow. Her short stories have previously been published in Mslexia magazine, and placed in the Cadenza Short Story Competition, Frome Festival Short Story Competition, and the Bristol Short Story Prize. She is a graduate of Philosophy and History at Glasgow University.
Victoria Owens worked first in the book trade and later as a legal executive before reading for an English degree. PhD research on John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid followed; she finished her thesis about ten days before her eldest daughter’s birth. She wrote her first novel when her younger daughter started playgroup and her second on Bath Spa University’s MA in Creative Writing, but neither has found a publisher. Victoria runs and swims to keep fit, enjoys choral singing and belongs to the Gaskell Society. She lives near Bristol.
Penelope Randall was born in Leicester. She grew up in Norfolk and Nottinghamshire and, for three teenage years, in the Bahamas. She read Engineering Science at Oxford University and has worked as a civil servant, editor, typesetter and playgroup assistant. She currently teaches science and maths and wants to start a campaign against education buzzwords. She has always loved writing stories, and recent successes (and near-misses!) encourage her to hope that her three novels may one day find a publisher. She lives in Manchester.
Nancy Saunders lives in a Hampshire village and works in Library Aquisitions, sending out lovely new books to hungry readers. Writing, fiddle-playing and enjoying the great outdoors are all squeezed in around the job. Nancy is a past member of Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp online writing group – without which her writing would not have won a couple of prizes and appeared in various publications. Elly and Oscar are Nancy’s two true significant others.
Stephanie Shields was brought up in the Midlands but has spent all of her adult life in the north of England, where she has combined sheep farming with a career in further education. She has written poetry since childhood, but short fiction is a more recent development. Having had some early publication of her poetry in the 1970s, she has continued as a covert writer. She is a member of the Otley Courthouse Writers, based in the market town of Otley, West Yorkshire.
Elsa A. Solender, a New Yorker, was president of the Jane Austen Society of North America from 1996-2000. Educated at Barnard College and the University of Chicago, she has worked as a journalist, editor, and college teacher in Chicago, Baltimore and New York. She represented an international non-governmental women’s organisation at the United Nations during a six-year residency in Geneva. She has published articles and reviews in a wide variety of American magazines and newspapers, but ‘Second Thoughts’ is her first published story. She has been married for 49 years, has two married sons and seven grandchildren.
Hilary Spiers lives in Stamford, Lincolnshire, works in adolescent health policy part-time and writes every day, when time and life permit. She has won a number of national writing competitions, been published in several anthologies and had some of her stories broadcast on the radio. Her abiding passion remains playwriting, for stage and radio. Her play Hoovering on the Edge was staged by Shoestring Theatre in September 2009 and she has had work performed at London’s Hampstead Theatre and the Oundle Literature Festival. While collecting rejection letters, she acts in and directs other writers’ plays.
Stephanie Tillotson joined the BBC in 1989 and worked in television and radio for many years, at length crossing to the independent sector in Wales. For the past ten years she has been writing, directing and performing for the theatre. Originally from Gilwern near Abergavenny, she now lives in Aberystwyth, where she has been teaching in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the university. At present she is editing a book of short stories for Honno called Cut on the Bias, a collection of fictional writing about women’s relationship to clothes and image.
Andrea Watsmore was born in the London/Essex borders in 1966, has four children and a Fine Art degree from Chelsea School of Art. This has led to a number of opportunities including usherette, engineer, tote operator, teacher, shop girl, bag lady and artist.
She has always written, whether in paintings or on lonely walls. Now she generally limits it to a spiral-bound notebook and laptop. ‘Bina’ is her first published story.