ABOUT

I grew up at the edge of the Peak District, and spent my childhood roaming the moors and searching for magical creatures amongst the bracken. My fascination with wild places and their legends began there and then. I devoured every story I could find, accompanying the Greek heroes on their adventures and slipping between worlds with Celtic shapeshifters.

I have always written. Journals, poetry, short stories for my children when they were young. During the pandemic, I enrolled in my first creative writing class, and I haven’t looked back since.

The more I wrote, the more the myths of the moors kept calling me home. One day, poring over a map of the Peak District, I spotted the name of a pool from a legend I had known as a child, and I knew I had found my story.

The Mermaid’s Pool, the first novel in my Dark Peak Trilogy, will be published in the US and Canada by Park Row on June 1st 2027, in the UK by Duckworth on November 1st 2027, and in the German-speaking world by Bastei Lübbe, also on November 1st 2027.

When I’m not writing creatively, I’m an organisational psychologist and a professor at INSEAD, a business school near Paris. There I research leadership transitions with a focus on women executives. My non-fiction book, Couples That Work (Penguin Life, 2019), was featured on Good Morning America, the BBC, The Atlantic, The Sunday Times and TED.