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 (to Alice: I think they’re all kind, really, but I’m not sure about the Red Queen). And so it began. I wrote agonised poems and short stories which were, unsurprisingly, rejected, 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, a story of love and marriage set among the British aristocracy and the American moneyed classes in late nineteenth-century England. (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.’ Sadly the original publishers of SPEAKING of LOVE, Beautiful Books, went out of business in 2011 but, happily for the novel, it’s just been released in a new Kindle edition.
My second novel, THE DANCE of LOVE, is about the many faces of love and is set in the same era as Downton Abbey. It will be published by Robert Hale Publishers in July, 2014.
COLLAGES, an anthology of new writing, was published in 2013 and includes an extract from my third novel, a work in progress called FOR THE LOVE OF LIFE about an angel who accidentally falls in love with a human being.
I live and write in south-west London. You can find me here.
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