Alexandra Sellers

Alexandra Sellers started dreaming about exotic locales at the age of 10,when she first cracked the cover of a small collection of tales and picturescalled "The Arabian Nights". The stories were taken from "The Thousand andOne Nights", and names like Samarkand, Shiraz, and Baghdad still carry amagic for her which no amount of current history can overshadow. The storiesmust have triggered something else in her, too, for it was at this time thatshe first began to dream of writing herself. Following the advice of JaneAusten, though she hadn't read it yet, Alexandra wrote her first story aboutthe world she knew, her cat. And following her own imagination, she wrotethe cat's story from inside the cat's head.


After beginnings like this, it flows naturally that her two favourite formsof fiction should become romance and science fiction. Her first romanticshort story sold in 1980 to the first magazine she sent it to, and her firstscience fiction was simultaneously rejected. She was too naïve to realizehow lucky she was with the romance story, and it never occurred to her tosend the science fiction story to a different publisher. She concentrated onromance, and her only serious foray into that other world so far has beenthe fantasy satire Spoken Cat, published in 1997.

Alexandra's favourite hobby is the learning of foreign languages, of whichshe has so far studied eight, sadly without becoming fluent in any. One ofthe most enjoyable periods in her life was the three years that she spent atthe School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she was thefirst student ever to graduate in the double degree of Persian and ReligiousStudies.

Alexandra lives with her husband, Nick, and a cat named Monsieur. The two ofthem are equal parts maddening and indispensable to her happiness. Alexandraonce sat down to try and count how many different places in her wanderinglife she has called home. She gave up when she reached 40 homes in 12 citiesand towns in six different countries. But she hasn't visited nearly as manyplaces as she'd like yet. In between bouts of travel and university,Alexandra has been a full-time writer since the publication of her firstnovel in 1980.