/

I began my first novel, The Confessions of a Protestant Priest, around the age of 9. This unlikely title was inspired by a school project on the Tudors, peopled by such memorable characters as Bloody Mary and the dashing Earl of Essex. My novel began with my unfortunate protagonist tied to the stake, the flames licking around his feet, as the church bells tolled the death of Queen Mary and a frantic messenger galloped up yelling, “Reprieve! Reprieve!”

I remember a carefully designed title page, crayoned on graph paper to help me keep the lettering straight – but the manuscript itself is, alas, lost to history.

Fast forward half a century and I am teaching English at a secondary school in East Yorkshire when my mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Since my parents live in Kent, and my ninety-year-old father is Mum’s sole carer, I take the long train journey down south once a fortnight at weekends to support him with her care.

And suddenly, I find myself with time to write – guilt-free time. I become one of those anti-social people you see on public transport, hunched over my laptop, sending out ‘do not disturb’ signals, and I begin my young adult novel, Calm. Clearly, I am still invested in protagonists who face fearful odds, but now the genre I favour is not historical but dystopian fiction – a genre which owes a great deal to history, as Margaret Atwood has demonstrated so effectively in The Handmaid’s Tale, where every dystopian element can be traced back to something that has happened somewhere and at some time in real life.

As for so many debut authors, finding a publisher is not easy. I submit my completed manuscript to around 40 agents and independent publishers. In a one-to-one with an agent, I am advised that publishers no longer want YA dystopias (my response that my students are still reading them is met with the memorable reply, ‘It’s not what young people are reading, it’s what publishers are looking for’). Increasingly conscious that I am writing for an overcrowded market, it is tempting to lose hope – except that the young people I teach are telling me that they like what I have written. I read the novel aloud to a class of thirteen and fourteen year-olds (initially claiming that it was a written by a friend, but they soon see through that subterfuge) and – to my surprise and delight – they love it. One student tells me it is one of her favourite books ever. So I persist, and at last an email from the Neem Tree Press drops into my inbox.

And here my teaching and writing careers merge. Ten of my GCSE class act as beta readers, spending some of their post-exams summer holiday reading the manuscript and submitting their comments and suggestions to the publisher. On publication day, in September 2024, my school hosts the launch of Calm, and I find myself one lunchtime with 200 students in the school theatre answering question after question about the novel, about writing, about getting published. Children stop me in the school playground to tell me that they have started their own novels; “How’s your novel going, Miss?” students ask me as we move from lesson to lesson. The buzz around publication is infectious, as young people realise that if someone they know can do it – someone ordinary and familiar – then perhaps they can too. One of my most heart-swelling moments has been learning that a student is writing Calm’s first piece of fanfiction (that, and my son sending me a photo of Calm on sale in Foyles, the London bookshop where, as a child, I would occasionally be taken as a treat when visiting the Big City – never dreaming I would one day have my own book on their shelves).

Fitting life as an author around a teaching career can be challenging; sometimes I am marking when I wish I could be writing; sometimes I am writing while a nagging little voice tells me I should be planning lessons or entering data... But the pleasure to be had, sharing this journey with colleagues and with the young people I teach, cannot be overstated.

So, onto book two. I already have my young beta readers lined up!