Life

I was born in Chelmsford, Essex, in 1968, and educated at Brentwood School, Essex, and Queens’ College, Cambridge, where I read Natural Sciences. I returned to Cambridge to study for a PhD in Developmental Psychology, which I was awarded in 1995. My first novel, The Auctioneer, was published by Fourth Estate in 1999 and a German translation appeared from Luchterhand in 2001. An extract from my novel-in-progress, Rosa and the Song Machine, appeared in New Writing 11 (British Council/Picador) in 2002. The first chapter of my novel-in-progress, A Box of Birds, was published in New Writing 14 (British Council/Granta, 2006). The Baby In The Mirror, a non-fiction work on children’s psychological development, was published by Granta in the UK in May 2008 and by Avery in the US in April 2009. Translations into Italian, German, Korean, Dutch and Greek are published or in preparation.

My commissioned short story, ‘Joyful Lagers of the World’, appeared in the North-East anthologies Bound (2004) and Magnetic North (2005). Another short story, ‘A Photograph’, was published in the 1994 May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories (selected and edited by Stephen Fry). A poem, ‘Quality’, appeared in the 1993 May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Poetry (selected and edited by Seamus Heaney). I have recently appeared at festivals in Barcelona, Sydney, Sheffield, Durham and Newcastle. My most recent reviewing work has been for the Sunday Telegraph, and I have also written for Scotland on Sunday, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Financial Times and the Guardian Review. I have taught creative writing, with a particular focus on psychological processes in reading and writing, at a variety of institutions including UEA and Newcastle University. Between 2004 and 2006 I worked as a mentor on the British Council’s Crossing Borders project for African writers, and I visited Ghana in February 2006 to run some workshops there. I work as a part-time senior lecturer in psychology at Durham University, and have published over forty scientific journal articles and two academic books.