Appearing:
Sunderland (17th), Gateshead (18th), Newcastle (19th)
Website
www.sallyprue.co.uk/
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Sally Prue isn't sure where she was born, but she was brought up in Hertfordshire from the time she was adopted as a baby. She still lives there, not far from the woods that form the setting for much of Cold Tom.
Sally went to Nash Mills and Longdean Schools, and after that she went to work in the paper mill about six houses down the road with all the rest of her family. She worked firstly as a clerk, and then as a Time and Motion person. It was quite fun, but she was glad to be able to give up work when her first daughter was born. Sally and her husband Roger now have two daughters: Elizabeth (who's often called Michelle) and Rosalind. Liz, who is autistic, lives at home and writes about opera and helps people who are depressed, and Roz lives in Nottingham, where she is training to be a lawyer.
When Liz and Roz were small, Sally spent a lot of time playing the piano and working out how to play it better. She taught recorder as a volunteer in her daughters' school, and then eventually was nagged into teaching recorder and piano for money. She also wrote and wrote and wrote children's fiction and gradually got better at that, too. After a long time, she was lucky enough to be taken on by Elizabeth Roy, an agent with huge amounts of patience and even more faith. Sally had quite a few bits of stuff published for Reading Schemes... and finally a novel. Hurray! The rest is on the Books page.
When Sally is not writing books she's often reading them, or writing e-mails. She also has a house and garden that decays just slightly faster than she can do anything about it. She likes walking, and birds and other animals and plants. She is really interested in frogs, art, making things, music, people, ideas, fabrics. She has a set of Northumbrian bagpipes, but she doesn't play them very often at the moment. Which is probably a good thing.
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