Catherine George

Catherine George was born in a village on the Welsh-English border, wherethe public library featured largely in her life. Her mother, who looked uponliterature as a basic necessity of life, fervently encouraged Catherine'spassion for reading, little knowing it would one day motivate her daughterinto writing her first novel.

At 18, Catherine met a future Engineer, who had set in a pendant a goldsovereign, that his grandmother put in his hand when he was born, andCatherine have never taken off since. After their marriage he swept her offto Brazil, where he worked as Chief Engineer of a large gold-miningoperation in the mountains of Minas Gerais, a setting which later provided avery popular background for several of Catherine's early novels. Nine happyyears passed there before the question of their small son's educationdecided their return to Britain. Not long afterward a daughter was born, andfor a time Catherine lived a fulfilled life as a wife and mother who alwaysmade time to read, especially in the bath!

Her husband's job took him abroad again, to Portugal, West Africa, andvarious countries of the Middle East, but this time she stayed home with thefamily. And spent a lot of lonely evenings in between the reunions when herhusband came home on leave. "Instead of reading other people's novels allthe time," he suggested one day, "why not have a shot at writing oneyourself?" So Catherine did.

But first she took a creative writing course. Encouraged by the otherstudents' enthusiasm for her contributions, she decided to try her hand atromance, and read countless Mills & Boon novels as research before writingone herself. Her first novel was accepted in 1982, which Romantic Timesvoted best of its genre for that year, along with more than sixty writtensince.

These days son and daughter have fled the nest, but they return with lovingregularity to where Catherine and her husband back for good from his travelslive, with Prince, the most recent Labrador, in a house built at the end ofVictoria's reign in four acres of garden on the cliffs between the beautifulWye Valley and the River Severn.