About

I was born in Kathmandu and brought up in Nepal, India and Pakistan, attending school in a hill-station in the Indian Himals. These origins gave me a love of mountains, of cross-cultural sharing and the richness of storytelling in all its forms.

Having an Australian passport, I attended university in Melbourne to train as an English and drama teacher, developing skills I have used in and out of classrooms ever since.

I have always written. My first major work was the stage play The Long Way Home performed in central Scotland in 1996 and later adapted for BBC Radio. I have written further plays for stage and radio, short stories, multiple articles, poetry, the novels A House Called Askival and Of Stone and Sky, and the narrative non-fiction book The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd. Widely published, anthologised and broadcast, my work has won awards and passionate responses from readers. Traversing genres, it often explores themes of place, identity, belonging and belief.

I regularly perform my writing and tell stories, particularly through the community project, Storylands Sessions. I love fostering imagination and creativity in others, which I do through workshops and projects for all ages, both in-person and online. A lifetime of literature, including English teaching and five happy years in a high school library, mean I am passionate about keeping alive our spaces for books and reading and the community conversations that arise from them.

South Asia and Australia keep calling me back, for visits and work, but Scotland has been home for nearly 30 years. I’m married with two grown-up sons and we live in the Cairngorms under the benign dictatorship of a golden retriever called Sileas.

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