About Sharon

Why write a biography? It only pins you down. Suffice to say I was born in Africa.  And already that’s seeing the world without its skin. My father was the local gynaecologist. My mother was born in Strasbourg. My grandmother lived with us. In many ways I loved my childhood, but not in others. I would have been cheating myself if I hadn’t left to study English literature in Britain. That was my feat of daring that altered the landscape of my life. Before the term started, I went to Paris, like all would-be artists and authors. It was spring. I was full of day-dreams, imagining myself capable of extraordinary insights and creativity. It was a time when everything  seemed possible. I could laugh at it now, but it propelled me to develop some of those qualities. In Paris, I fell in love and got engaged, but in the bleak, cold winter of my first term at Edinburgh, I broke it off.  I got a First class MA Honours and the Janet Christie Bequest to study abroad. So, I drove to Florence with a friend and lived in an old farmhouse for 8 months, learning Italian, studying at the British Institute. In the slipstream of  my life I imagined that I would be a great writer, another Virginia Woolf, have the perfect family, be the best mother. My path was a journalism, a single mother of one daughter. My writing included  campaigns to save a brutalised lioness in northern Italy, Hebridean seals at risk, endangered and slaughtered leatherback turtles in Tobago, and premature babies at Dulwich hospital in dire need of incubators. I covered news, travel, and then big interviews with iconic figures in the public eye. Freddie Mercury, Angelina Jolie, Amy Winehouse, George Michael, Bono, and literally hundreds more. I walked away from journalism to live in Venice and write my first novel, Behind the Mirror. My second, All the People We Are, is set on the Cycladic island of Folegandros. The third, The Shed, is set in Berlin through WW2, and Southern Rhodesia in the 60’s. My literary agent is Jason Bartholomew of The Bks Agency.

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