I came to writing later in life, but once I started, I never looked back. For years, I poured my creativity into art - taking courses here and there while raising a family - and eventually earned a degree in art and design. I love expressing myself visually, but I underestimated how powerful stories could be until I began researching my local area.

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The journey began with the Basildon Heritage Trail, I was a researcher and wrote a blog about my findings. To my amazement, that blog led Amberley Publishing to contact me in 2013 with an incredible invitation: would I write a book about Basildon? It was a huge honour - and the start of something I never imagined. My first book, Basildon Through Time, was published in 2014, followed by Lost Basildon in 2019.

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Local stories matter, that's what drew me to Geraldine Evans's family history and inspired me to write about The Barge in Vange for Essex Life in 2020. Stories like that - woven into the landscape, passed down through families - deserve to be heard. Much like the stories my family passed down to me about our large Italian/English family who lived in London in the early and mid 1900s.

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In 2023 I joined the Basildon Writers' Group and contributed to their second anthology,

It Happened in Essex 2. My story, based on the 1953 North Sea flood, focuses on the Canvey Island community that was so deeply affected by the disaster. I'm especially proud that this book supports Basildon Hospital Radio (BHR 107.3). 

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