I live in Cape Town, South Africa, with my husband.

Ever since I can remember I have shamelessly hoarded glimpses of  interesting strangers and random overheard conversations.

Now I write contemporary suspense fiction about normal people with a double life. A boy sleeps in a coffin and plans his escape from the family business funeral parlour. A woman enters a world of sexual and emotional abandon in order to find her lost husband.

The people in my novels exist on the border between real and unreal.  They confront talismanic forces as they walk a tightrope between their everyday lives and another hidden plane of existence where sex and death are the order of business, and forbidden secrets are currency.

I like to call it the chiaroscuro (light-dark) effect – playing with the unbearable lightness of being (forever grateful to Kundera!) and keeping the darkness at bay is what fiction is all about.

My short stories, essays and poetry have been featured in The Sunday Times, South Africa Writing, Women Flashing, Writing the Self, Difficult to Explain, Twist, The Face of the Spirit, Africa! My Africa!, Heart of Africa, and New Contrast.

My debut novel, The Good Cemetery Guide, was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the Olive Schreiner Award.

Inspired by Margaret Atwood’s genre-bending The Blind Assassin and Stieg Larsson’s tour de force, the Millennium Trilogy, and wanting to undertake something new, I started work on the Limbo Trilogy, a suspense series.

Paola Dante’s trials and the mystery of Daniel, begun in Lady Limbo and continued in Wolf Trap, have their origin in an unusual travel story.

I am currently working on volume 3 in the trilogy, due to be published early 2020.

When I am not writing I coach and mentor creative writing students and other writers.

Before all of that, I worked in the Information Technology sector as a Business Consultant and Project Manager. My aha moment came when I heard about a Creative Writing Program offered by the University of Cape Town.