When I was a child, most families I knew took a daily and evening newspaper: in our case, the Daily Mirror and the Coventry Evening Telegraph. At the weekend, the Saturday Pink sports paper and a Sunday newspaper. By the age of sixteen, I was subscribing to the New Statesman, loving both the journalism and poetry they published, and dreaming of becoming a journalist. I wanted to witness a world I suspected a working class girl was not supposed to see. The reaction of the school careers advisor? You have no chance – try personnel management instead.

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I didn’t take the advice. I worked on local newspapers around the country, began to write for national newspapers and eventually spent more than fifteen years at the Sunday Times as deputy editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, where I co-founded the Sunday Times Short Story Award with Matthew Evans, and briefly as editor of News Review. I’ve worked as a senior editor for Newsweek and my features have appeared in a range of journals including the Sunday Times, Financial Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail and Irish Times.

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I currently sit on the boards of the Catholic newspaper, The Tablet and English PEN.

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