Author Interviews

1. My first language was Catalan – I was brought up in my mother’s native Catalonia for the first two years of my life. My father was a writer – ...

Born Sarah Cox in 1835, the woman who became known as ‘Fanny Cornforth’ was the daughter of a blacksmith in a small Sussex village. Her family slowly died off through ...

On the back of the incredibly dramatic female-first finale of Channel 4's SAS: Who Dares Wins on Sunday, which saw the recruits facing the intense interrogation stage; Female First speak ...

Like many people, I found the first few lockdown months of 2021 very hard. Short days, bad weather, and being heavily restricted by the Covid rules, I tried to find ...

- It takes a village to bury a child . . . 1 September 1939. As the mass evacuation takes place across Britain, thousands of children leave London for the ...

I write this as my second book goes to print. It feels like it should be the tenth, and simultaneously like I woke up just yesterday and decided audaciously that ...

1. I have far too many animals. Currently I am hosting three dogs, three cats, four chickens, six pigeons, a snake and a lizard. Oh, and two guinea pigs. No, ...

1) Growing up, I was more likely to be writing a poem in my free time than hitting or catching a ball, but now I’m the captain of my local ...

We have all been there. Reading a novel and a character that we have joined on a journey that has grown close to our heart perishes and all we are ...

Dear Jilly I’ve always wanted to meet you. I’ve got a very clear idea of how it would go. We’d have a lovely, gossipy lunch in the Bar Sinister. We’d ...

How can writing help you through times of uncertainty? A good question and one that I thought about at length and in depth before putting metaphorical pen to paper. In ...

Sarah Cooke is a High-Performance Coach but she used to represent England at lacrosse before turning her hand to holistic health and massage therapy. Cooke is a big believer in ...

-  5 I am very bad at taking time off. I have a day job in journalism, a night job writing books and two amazing kids who fill up all ...

Author Jenna Kernan’s new release, The Adoption, is a dark, twisty domestic thriller set in sunny Florida, though not the Florida you see in advertising campaigns. This is the insider’s ...

1. I used to be a journalist: Writing novels was always my dream but I wasn’t convinced at 21 that I had lived enough to qualify for the job. So ...

A trip to Ireland should be on every bucket list: a pint of Guinness in a traditional pub; a tour of the Ancient East; a smooch of the Blarney Stone. ...

We’ve all seen the Perfect Mummies, haven’t we? The ones with the impeccably blow-dried hair, and glowing ‘no make-up make-up’ (that takes twice as long to put on as it ...

I was a fan of Marian Keyes for a long time before I knew her. When I was a teenager and well into my twenties, a time during which commercial ...

When I was 12, I read a book in which the main character was a sorcerer, and there was a school of sorcerers, mostly (only) for boys. Later in the ...

I wanted to write books from about the age of 8 or 9 when I discovered Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven series – that was the moment I knew I was ...

To have many more than seven things I’d like my readers to know about me must be a sign of a varied, happy and fulfilled life. But I had to ...

I love summer and I love hot weather. I think I must be part lizard, because I bask in the sun whenever I’m on holiday or on a writing break. ...

1. First hand experience of hospital: In The End of Men a virus to which women are immune kills 90 per cent of the world’s men. An early scene happens in A ...

-  I moved around a lot as a child. I grew up in Scotland but we moved to different places in the Scottish Borders and then Lanarkshire. It meant I ...