Portia Da Costa

I am an English author and I have lived and worked in West Yorkshire all my life. My present home is in a small town half way between Wakefield and Leeds. I'm a devoted cat lover and share my home with my husband and our three beloved cats, Kuffer, Alice and Mulder. In another life, I worked as a librarian, and in local government in a number of different clerical jobs. I began writing for pleasure in 1984, and shortly after became a member of the Forum Society's Literary and Fantasy Group. I contributed regularly to the Group's Newsletter for a number of years, writing both non-fiction and fiction under the pseudonym 'J. W. Blackheart'. On leaving the group, I began writing with publication in mind - trying both the romantic and erotic genres. I had my first success in January 1991 with a short story - The Man in Black - that appeared in FORUM. Since then, I have had twenty two erotic and erotic romance novels published, and my short stories - almost a hundred - have appeared in a variety of different erotic and women's magazines, as well as in many different anthologies and two solo collections of my own stories. In 1995 I won the Olympia Short Story Competition for my story A Day and a Night and in 1998 I won the award of Best Erotic Novel of the Year for my novel The Stranger.