Biography
Now living in the South West of England, Claire’s love of history is equalled only by her delight in the natural world and the unruly sea by which she lives with her family and assorted animals by the wild, wide sea.
Always on the move with my Air Force family, I spent a peripatetic but happy childhood in my book-lined imagination fueled by tales from the past.
I ached to tell stories but struggled to read and write, and it wasn’t until the age of nine when living in Norway that I broke through the barriers. When I did, I spent every spare minute reading everything and anything I could. I loved CS Lewis, Arthur Ransome, the Bronte sisters, and Tolkien.
Day-dreaming took pole position in the life of a nascent author and, without the distraction of television and beguiled by the wide, wild landscapes that surrounded me, I lived between the real world and that conjured in my head. Hooked on history and literature, I returned to England and a bleak period of secondary schooling where I never quite followed the plot expected of a typical teenager.
A diagnosis of dyslexia gave context to the previous years of struggle. Undeterred, university gave me the opportunity to indulge my love of history and it was where I met my future husband. Together with our friends, a couple of Siamese cats, and a ghost, we shared a cottage in the grounds of a castle between the confluence of two rivers, and dreamed of setting up a school.
After a career running our specialist dyslexia and autism school in the South East, I am now writing full-time in the South-West surrounded by restless seas, ancient landscapes and wide endless skies.
