A little more about Jo

I grew up in Bromsgrove, a former nail-making town in the middle of England notable for having manufactured the gates to Buckingham Palace. Bromsgrove’s minor literary claim to fame is as the birthplace of poet A. E. Housman (he of A Shropshire Lad) and the final resting place of J.R.R. Tolkien’s diabetic mother. I was born into a world of stories, albeit on a television screen, my grandfather opening the first electrical shop in the town in 1922, a business that is still trading today. As soon as I learned to read, I swapped television for books. Lots of books. As a shy and introverted child, fiction became my escape. 

My parents gave me my first typewriter when I was eight years old, and I started the first of many unfinished manuscripts. Having always relied more on observation than imagination, I would have to wait a few more years before I’d gathered enough material for a novel. Luckily, life presented some interesting opportunities along the way. 

At thirteen, I surprised everyone by winning a scholarship to Bromsgrove School, founded in 1553 and at the time a prestigious all-boys school. As one of only fourteen girls among four hundred boys, it was a character-building time. I went on to study medicine at Cambridge and Oxford universities, then trained as a GP. I enjoyed a brief stint travelling the world as a ship’s doctor during which I met my future husband. We emigrated to Australia with two small children (both ours, I hasten to add) for a year in 2003, and never left.

I may never have realised my childhood dream of becoming a published author had it not been for a ten-pin bowling accident in 2012. Doing the splits (for the first and only time in my life) was a dramatic and painful start to a writing career – I am assured there are easier ways – but the silver lining was that with six weeks off work following a hamstring repair, I finally took the plunge (no pun intended) and enrolled in my first creative writing course. 

I served my apprenticeship by writing short stories, many featuring older characters, the significance of which I would only realise later. It was during a residency at The Bundanon Trust, courtesy of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, that I began work on the novel that would become my debut, The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village.

When I’m not at my desk I can be found muttering to myself on long daily walks, pointing out interesting birds to complete strangers, or losing my sunglasses over the side of a boat on Pittwater.