Patricia Elliott

I spent most of my childhood overseas, in Europe and the Far East. Every two or three years we moved somewhere new. This meant I kept changing schools, but I didn’t mind because if I didn’t like that particular school, I knew I would soon be leaving! I was a dreamy, shy child, who had a vivid interior world. I began writing when I was six, in smudged pencil. I’d been given a Dachshund puppy for my birthday, so I wrote ‘How to Train Dogs’ - all of five, misspelled pages! But later I wrote ‘novels’ which took up whole exercise books. These were mostly adventure stories, which I read out to my long-suffering younger brother. They had illustrations, maps, book jackets with blurbs, and a ‘Letter from the Author’ for my imaginary readers. My happiest time as a child was the four-year period we spent in Singapore, where I belonged to the wonderful Raffles Library, an impressive building with high ceilings, where vast fans spun silently above you. The children’s department was crammed with books ranging from the Victorian and Edwardian period (ancient and dusty) to contemporary fiction (smelling of exotic food). I didn’t care when they had been written. I read them avidly, as many as I could. In those days the island of Singapore still had some jungle, and when you drove up country through Malaya – where we would go for holidays – you had to lock your car doors in case you were ambushed by brigands. When I grew up, I worked in publishing and, when my husband went to work in New York, I worked for several years in a children’s bookshop in Manhattan. Back in England I became a publisher’s reader, and, with my two sons growing up, began to write again. I took an M.A. in Writing for Children, and after that, taught courses for adults in creative writing and children’s literature - which I still do sometimes, as well as visiting schools to talk about my books. I live with my husband and a yellow Labrador called Alfie, in a miniscule brick cottage in Mortlake, near the River Thames, in SW London, and in Suffolk, in an old vicarage behind a church, where ancient gravestones come tumbling into the garden.