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I grew up in Zambia and had an idyllic childhood reading books in the sunshine. After going to boarding school in Cornwall when I was eleven, which was an enormous shock to my system – Penzance in the winter is not a sunny place – I read Modern Languages at university.
After several years of working in London, I went to Australia on holiday and fell in love with Sydney. Living there was like a fairy tale compared with working on the grimy outskirts of London and as a result, Sydney seems to find its way into my writing even when the setting is on the other side of the world.
Once I had children, I had more time to write. And it was also time to come home, if only to avoid the 24-hour flights to see family with my kids asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ before we’d even taken off. We now live in Wiltshire in the middle of fields, which required a rapid update to my Sydney wardrobe of shorts and flip-flops.
Apart from writing, I enjoy reading voraciously across a wide range of genres; other people’s gardens (green-fingered I am not); kitchen discos with my increasingly reluctant children; and walking the world’s most stubborn springer spaniel.
Clare Hawken 