Liz Fielding

Reading is, and always has been, the first love of my life. Except writing.

Success came early — I was twelve when I won an Easter egg in a hymn writing competition at school ““ but life intervened with my plans to become a hot shot author. The day job. Not that this was dull. I travelled to Zambia at the age of twenty where I worked as a secretary, before following my personal hero to, among other places, the Middle East, Kenya, Botswana and ambition became buried in the joyful business of raising a family.

I never forgot that I was a “writer”, however. I wrote stories for the iconic BBC radio programme, Listen With Mother. Magazines articles. Story scripts for a little girl’s picture comic called Twinkle. My first adult fiction was a ghost story which won a writing competition and that gave me confidence to move onto something bigger. Would it be historical fiction (I fell in love with Heyer back in my Zambian days), crime, thrillers. While I was pondering all the exciting possibilities, I read a magazine piece about two Harlequin/Silhouette greats, Charlotte Lamb and Anne Hampson and discovered, rather late in life, romantic fiction. I read everything I could lay my hands on, then, certain I had a grasp of the genre, began writing. My grasp was not secure and I had three rejections ““ I still have those painful letters! — but my fourth submission, An Image of You, set in Kenya, was published in 1992.

Since then I’ve written more than fifty romances. Two of them have won a RITA, a third won the Betty Neels Rosebowl trophy which goes with UK “Romance Prize”. And last year Romantic Times honoured me with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Love and Laughter.

The dh and I are empty-nesters these days, living in a tiny hamlet in west Wales, “Merlin” country, where excitement means a visit from the mobile shop, the travelling library, the fish and veg men. But I’m a writer, I invent my own worlds. Once the door to the my cabin in the woods is closed I can be anywhere my imagination takes me; the desert kingdom of Ramal Hamrah, the villages of Upper Haughton, Little Hinton and Longbourne, where romance is always just around the corner, or I can jet off to New York, the Mediterranean, even the Himalayas.

Pick up a book and come with me