About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Hawksley was brought up in a Georgian manor house in Co. Durham. It was a splendid place for an imaginative child, with attics full of stuffed animal heads and old weapons. Elizabeth read her way through much of the 19th century library, including original copies of The Strand Magazine with the Sherlock Holmes stories.

She was very happy at her first school in the wilds of upper Teesdale (it had no electricity) where she told stories after lights out. Her next school, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, was hellish. She survived by writing novels - which came in handy (though not, possibly, in the way the teenage author intended!) when she came to do her ‘How I became an Historical Novelist’ talk.

Elizabeth went to Paris to be ‘finished’ but ended up at the Sorbonne, read English at the University of Sussex, did a Post Graduate Certificate of Education, and embarked on Life. She got married and she and her husband co-founded the fringe theatre company Incubus and, later, the touring company TheatreMobile for which she wrote plays, one of which opened the Leeds International Children’s Theatre Festival.

With the arrival of children, she went back to writing novels, with part-time teaching to help pay the bills. Later, to stop worrying about her children’s ‘A’ levels, she did an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College and gained a distinction.

Nowadays, she has a ‘portfolio’ career. She has had a dozen novels published, together with Getting the Point, a punctuation guide for adults co-authored with Jenny Haddon. She also gives workshops and talks on various aspects of creative writing, reviews for the Historical Novel Society, is a member of the Islington Writers for Children, and of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, where she is a reader for the new writers’ scheme.

Elizabeth loves travel and history. Her idea of heaven is a pile of books to read, a ruined Greek temple nearby, Mozart to listen to and a meal with friends in the evening. Oh, and she wouldn’t mind if Rupert of the Rhine, John Donne or Lord Byron dropped round later - for conversation, naturally.