Lorraine Jenkin first had a niggle for writing ten years ago when she used to fit it in amongst a busy job and a wild social life. Finally, on a rainy Sunday morning, she decided she needed to calm down and do things properly, or give up fighting and become a ravaged work-obsessed alcoholic. She took the decision to quit her job, rent out her house and set off for South America with little more than a tent and a toothbrush in order to write her first novel. Lorraine spent her days walking alone across the Argentine Pampas, swatting flies, getting bitten by dogs and having fights with men with knives. She spent her nights shivering and scared in a tent filled with mice and bugs. Eventually she returned home and had her book, Chocolate Mousse and Two Spoons published by Honno.
She was greeted back in Britain by the man she’d met at her leaving do eight months earlier and a baby soon followed. Amongst the piles of vests, Eating Blackbirds was somehow written and published, again by Honno. Baby number two came along frighteningly quickly and life became a tired whirl of picking up socks, stepping in nappies and losing her pen. When Baby number three entered the world, a spell in hospital allowed her to complete the editing of Cold Enough to Freeze Cows which was published in July 2010 (Honno). Perhaps unsurprisingly, writing ground to a halt.
However, the niggle to write slowly returned and ideas would pop into Lorraine’s head that would make for a good book... She started to jot down her thoughts and slowly slowly Jam Tomorrow was born!
Lorraine lives in Mid Wales with partner, Huw, and their three daughters. She sets her books amongst the hills around her and her style has been called a cross between Tom Sharpe and The Vicar of Dibley. Lorraine loves to see the tiny amusing details in people and then massively embellish them in her writing. I love the bloke who you chat to for ten minutes, and then he pulls a dead mole out of his pocket to show the kids, or the guy with the bad wig, or the lady with three sheep in the back of the car. If, when I’m writing, I feel I’ve read about this character before, I stop, twiddle with something in their history to make them a bit different and then I can ensure they do far more interesting things…
With the three children now at school, Lorraine had intended to devote her time to writing in a sitting-in-one-of-those-wicker-swings-in-a-floaty-dress-with-lovely-hair kind of way. Strangely enough, it’s not quite worked out as planned …
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