Josie Metcalfe

Josie's childhood was a strange mixture of loneliness and too much company. As the eldest of a large family, solitude was at a premium, but as an Army brat she had few friends of her own as they were always on the move. Her books became both her friends and her means of escape from clamoring siblings.

After school she trained as a teacher with a special interest in fabrics and design, and, being small, still finds that the clothes she can find time to design and make for herself fit better than anything she buys. The spare pieces of fabric that gradually pile up started her interest in patchwork and quilting and for a while she took commissions to make quilts.

Her abiding love, though, is books. She has been reading since her mother, herself a teacher, taught her when she was four and she has always loved being surrounded by them. The transition from voracious reader (on holiday she could fly through as many as seven books in a day) to writing herself seems obvious in retrospect and she loves it, even when the characters aren't behaving themselves for her!