My first novel was The Return of Captain John Emmett (Virago), published in hardback last year and paperback this April. It will also be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US in July. It is currently Orange New Writers Book of the Month (April 2011) in a joint promotion with Waterstone's, and is also short-listed for the Waverton Good Reads Award.
My new novel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, a mystery set in 1924, in the ancient landscape between Stonehenge and the Savernake Forest, will be published by Virago this May, and HMH in the USA next spring.
My previous non-fiction books included Following Hadrian, a reconstruction of the restless travels of the creative, scholarly and melancholy first-century Roman emperor around his Empire; city guides to Athens and Rome; and a memoir of my family,The Sunlight on the Garden.
I also write poetry and was a recent prize-winner in the Bridport poetry competition and short-listed for the Forward Prize in 2009. My latest poems can be found in the current issue of Tellus Magazine. More profitably I am also a ghost blogger...
I have contributed to publications as varied as the Financial Times, Independent, Big Issue and Vogue and produced the libretto for the requiem for Linda McCartney, Farewell, composed by Michael Berkeley (OUP).
I read Classics at Cambridge as a mature student and have a post-graduate degree in Ancient History. I've had numerous jobs including being a (rather bad) wine waitress, making a survey of inscriptions in a large village churchyard, writing travel brochure copy, teaching at university and running poetry workshops.
I am currently Chair of the Criticos Prize (for an outstanding book in English about, or inspired by, Greece) and I hold a RLF fellowship at the University of Warwick.
I have three children and a young Viszla dog. I work in a restored shepherd's hut in an old apple orchard on the edge of a Cotswold valley and in a small cottage on the Ionian island of Paxos.
