Biography
I was born in Leicester, England. My parents came from Galway and Mayo in the West of Ireland and settled in the Midlands in the early 1950s. I am the fifth of eight children.
After school, I trained to be a teacher in Hull and then I taught for thirteen years in Yorkshire; Nottinghamshire; Essex, where I was a Special Needs Co-ordinator and Leicester before I became a full time writer in 1991.
I am married with two children and live in Leicester, a few streets away from the house where I was born and lived for the first eighteen years of my life.
My first play was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1992 and my first novel for children was published in 1994.