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Author Biography -Linda Green
I loved working on regional newspapers but by 1998 my features were getting too long and the urge to write a novel had become too great so I left my staff job to write my first novel and work as a freelance journalist. I have written for The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Times Educational Supplement, The Big Issue, Wanderlust and Community Care Magazine. I’ve also had a short story published in Best magazine
I found the writing and working from home a very solitary process so also worked as co-ordinator of the Birmingham Bureau of Children’s Express, a national charity which runs a learning through journalism programme for young people and taught journalism to schoolchildren for the National Academy of Writing. After I moved north in 2001 I qualified as an adult education tutor and taught creative writing classes to students aged between 18 and 82 for the Workers Educational Association across Calderdale, West Yorkshire.
After more than a hundred rejections from agents for my first novel (and more rewrites than I care to remember) I finally got an agent but still couldn’t get a publisher. I started work on my second novel I DID A BAD THING in 2003, finished the first draft and gave birth to my son Rohan in 2004, rewrote the novel and got a new agent in 2005, obtained a two-book deal with Headline Review in 2006 and here I am.
I live in Todmorden, West Yorkshire (which is great despite being one of the wettest places in England), am married to Ian Hodgson, a sports photographer for the Daily Mail, and have a two-year-old son, Rohan, whose favourite book is currently Tell Me Something Happy Before I Go To Bed.
I enjoy travelling (though I haven’t been anywhere more exotic than CenterParcs since I had Rohan) and have trekked after wild orang-utans in Borneo, been to the edge of the Arctic Circle to see polar bears and as far south as Tierra del Fuego to photograph penguins (yes, I know it would have been easier and cheaper to go to Chester zoo!). I also sponsor a brother and sister Karma Kunchok and Tsewang Dhargyal who I met while visiting a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal.
And here are a few of my favourite things:
Novel: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Authors: Margaret Atwood, Nick Hornby.
Music: Blondie, The Police, U2, Alanis Morissette, Counting Crows and Beth Orton.
Films: The Shawshank Redemption, Dead Poets’ Society, Truly, Madly, Deeply.
TV: The Royle Family, Ally McBeal, Have I Got News for You, Newsnight.
Food: Red peppers, mangos, roasted cashew nuts, pesto sauce, Green & Blacks Maya Gold chocolate, strawberries, houmous and cherry tomatoes (not all eaten at the same time!).
Places in the world: Pokhara, Nepal; Tanjung Puting National Park, Borneo; Churchill, Canada; Homer, Alaska, The Lake District, England.
And a few of my least favourite things. If I was on Room 101 my selections would be: Women in unsuitable footwear (eg: white stilettos for muddy canal towpaths), tights (the 15-denier American tan variety), Thomas the Tank Engine stories (those engines are so mean and miserable), candyfloss (I don’t do pink and sweet) and the notice on pay and display machines which says ‘overpayments accepted’ (big of them!). |
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