I began writing when I was quite young. I loved reading and believed in the characters so much that I wrote messages to them on the flyleaves. I wrote poems and short stories which were, unsurprisingly, terrible, but a wonderful array of English teachers encouraged me and years later, in 1995, Heather Holden-Brown (who was then at BBC Books) commissioned me to write a 30,000-word ending to Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel, THE BUCCANEERS (I wrote under my full name, Angela Mackworth-Young, in those days). In 2001 I was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from Middlesex University and my first novel, SPEAKING of LOVE, was published by Beautiful Books in 2007, when I was 56. I take great courage from the sentence on the flyleaf of E. Annie Proulx’s THE SHIPPING NEWS: ‘E. Annie Proulx published her first novel, POSTCARDS, in 1991 at the age of 56.’
I have had short stories for children published in the American short story magazines CRICKET and SPIDER, and in the Australian short story magazine, THE SCHOOL MAGAZINE. One of these stories was also published in the US equivalent of the UK’s Key Stage 2 literacy publications by American Institutes for Research as a model for academic excellence. In 2010, another of these stories was included in the collection THE JUST WHEN? STORIES.
My second novel, THE DANCE of LOVE, was published in 2014 by Buried River Press, who were bought by Crowood Press who subsequently sold their fiction to Joffe Books. My third and fourth are in different stages of progress. These novels are very different in tone and voice, era and setting, but the thing they have in common is the difficulty we humans have when we try to talk about what’s in our hearts.
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