About the author

laurette-long-novel-writerLaurette was born in the UK, near Brontëland. Graduating from the University of Leicester with a degree in English, she taught in the USA, UK and France, where she now lives.

Her forays into fiction writing when she was seven reveal her literary influences and distinctive style. “The Phantom Ghost Girl of Raven Castle” begins: ‘Vicky Dare, the girl detective and her big Alsatian, Rex…’ then stops. The Ruined Cottage” is longer and also demonstrates she is equally at home with either first or third-person narrator: ‘…it was a favourite haunt of mine and I never grew tired of it.’ In the chilling tale “The adventures of Carlotta”, the heroine ‘…dashed to the door her face white with horror’ while, surprisingly, in “The Secret at the Ball” ‘…a secret compartment was revealed! There glittering lay the Lane jewels!’

(Yes, she is a hoarder, incapable of parting with childhood books and notebooks.)

Aged 10 she developed a passion for the theatre, and throughout her career wrote plays for students. “A Midsummer’s Nightmare”, where Shakespeare’s lovers get into time warps in the wood, meeting Dracula and Little Red Riding Hood, was a tricky favourite. Everyone wanted to play Dracula. She had to wield authority. (Those with pointed canines had an advantage). Later, unable to find a textbook suitable for adult students of English, she wrote one. Beguiled by an admirable work of French literary criticism about American writers in Paris*, she translated it. (Hoarder, bossy, dilettante.)

In 2013 the ghosts of Vicky Dare and Carlotta nudged her into a return to fiction. “Biarritz Passionwas inspired by the Basque country and its magic. (Go see!) An Amazon fan, she attempted self-publishing. After wrestling with formatting rules and sweating during the on-line tax interview, she finally hit the ‘submit’ button in March 2014, thus proving that even non-techies can do it. (Hoarder, bossy, dilettante and getting better with computers).

Book 2 of the French Summer Novel series, “Hot Basque”, was published in May 2015. This was followed in October 2016 by a prequel to the series “The Passage of Desire”, which steps back into the 1990s to a pivotal moment in the life of Alexandra, the mother of the two main female characters in the series.  The third and final book, “Biarritz-Villa Julia”, came out in 2019.

Meanwhile she pursues her ambition of transforming a hill of brambles into a Mediterranean paradise in spite of various setbacks (tendinitis of the shoulder, a new bionic hip, dog-sitting for the neighbours, cat-sitting for the neighbours, hen-sitting for the neighbours, helping on local fête committees, attending the numerous apéritifs and barbecues necessary to organise such events, etc etc) . These adventures will be recounted in a new book “From Nettles to Nightingales” (currently a Work In Progress).

 

* Jean Méral, “Paris dans la littérature américaine,”  (Editions du CNRS 1983)