Having started to write after I was married to a GP (later a psychiatrist) and had had two of my four children, I have to date produced a body of work which comprises fiction, non-fiction, juvenile, mémoir and plays for stage and screen. My work has been widely translated and serialized on radio, and my fifty-plus short stories have been syndicated worldwide and published in volume form (The Man Who Understood Women). FINAL DRAFT: Reflections on Life is my twenty-seventh book.
About me
The Writing Game (non-fiction), is widely used for reference by both aspiring and published authors and my two books for children have enjoyed many reprints. After almost fifty years one of them, Aristide, is still in print in France.
Passionate about the theater, my three stage plays Home Truths (starring Edward Hardwicke and Christopher Cazenove), An Eligible Man and Change of Heart (starring Julie-Kate Olivier, daughter of the late Sir Laurence) have been produced in London before touring the UK. An Eligible Man, is still in the repertory in Poland where it has run for several years.
My work for TV includes episodes for the popular BBC series Doctors and the pilot for Shrinks (Euston Films and London Weekend Television). I have also written commissioned film scripts both in the UK and the USA.
I am a member of Bafta (where each year I get to vote on the merits of a deluge of new movies) and have acted as sole judge for the Authors Club First Novel Award, judged the Betty Trask Fiction Award and chaired the judging panels for the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award (twice). I have served on the Executive Committee of PEN where I worked for Writers in Prison, and on the Society of Authors Executive Committee. I am a member of the Writers’ Guild and of the Royal Society of Literature.
I have written articles for the Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Author, and the Writers’ Bulletin as well as fiction reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times and the Jewish Chronicle.
I have a world-wide circle of appreciative readers, from Australia and New Zealand to South Africa and the USA, with whom I keep in close touch.
Over the years I have attended Evening Classes in a variety of subjects and am a Cordon Bleu cook, the lessons of which have gradually been superceded by the ubiquitous ‘take-away’.
I now have four supportive daughters deeply engaged in professions from medicine and teaching to the law, psychotherapy and alternative medicine, and ten grandchildren who keep me up-to-date with a rapidly changing world.
On my own now, I live in London and writing is still my passion. It ‘eliminates the disagreeables’ and – despite the title of my twenty-seventh book – I intend to pursue it for as long as I am able to.