I was an editor in publishing working with lots of lovely authors for years but always wanted to write. My first novel, Going Home, came out in 2005 and my latest, The Beloved Girls, was published in paperback in April 2022. I wish I’d written more novels only it takes me longer than I think to write them, and I had babies at various points who don’t get the whole ‘I need to write for five hours now’. And the thing no one tells you is writing them gets harder, not easier, and sometimes I wish I did another job except I can’t imagine not writing. I have written since I was a child, first on books I stapled together with paper then notebooks then a laptop that crashed and lost all of the novel I was writing in secret back in 2002