About Sarah Bower

From learning her letters at the age of four, it was clear to Sarah that the purpose of stringing these squiggles together on the page was to invent a range of possible lives more exciting than that mapped out for the elder daughter of a successful South Yorkshire businessman. She won her first literary prize at the age of nine, for an Orwellian fable about a girl whose humanity was put on trial by a court of animals - the handwritten, fully illustrated version was displayed on the wall of her primary school until the building was pulled down to make way for a high rise hotel.

Throughout her childhood, Sarah adopted - variously and in no particular order - the personae of Champion the Wonder Horse, Black Beauty, Tom from The Water Babies, Jo March, Heathcliff, Riki Tiki Tavi, the Jewess Rebecca from Ivanhoe, and the Famous Five's George. Those concerned for her welfare told themselves she would grow out of it. Imagine their distress when, at the age of fourteen, having put aside Monica Edwards in favour of Jean Plaidy, she fell in love with Cesare Borgia. Long before becoming a protagonist in The Book of Love, he was the hero of Sarah's second schoolgirl novel, written to take the boredom out of boarding school and to entertain friends - some of whom, amazingly, have remained friends. She wrote four of these 'juvenilia', all before her seventeenth birthday, in linen bound notebooks given to her by her bemused father. She did try to burn them once, but her husband rescued them.

A hostile careers mistress, followed by marriage, children and the need to earn a 'proper' living put a stop to Sarah's writing for twenty years. She worked in a steel factory, a children's hospice and sold cheese on a market stall among other things before beginning to write again about ten years ago. In 2001 she took an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia where she now teaches part time. She also writes for a number of magazines, from MsLexia to The Manufacturer, works as a reader and mentor for two literary consultancies and is a freelance literature project manager. She was UK editor of The Historical Novels Review for two years, and remains a regular contributor to the Review and itssister publication, Solander. Oh, and she writes novels too.

The Needle in the Blood began as an idea for a short story collection, until Andrew Motion, Sarah's tutor at UEA, said he thought it sounded more like a novel. Being understandably reluctant to argue with the Poet Laureate, she set to. It took three years to research and write - Sarah can't even sew on a button with any conviction, and her only knowledge of Odo of Bayeux when she started was a vague memory of her French teacher, one Madame Martini, galloping about the assembly hall on a hobbyhorse and shouting, "Regardez moi! Je suis l'Eveque Odon encourageant les combatants!"

Sarah lives in Suffolk with her husband, two golden retrievers and an obese cat. She has two grown up sons and a gorgeous grandson. She is a cricket fanatic who spends summer weekends baking Victoria sponges and scrubbing the knees of white flannels with a Vanish bar. She was once struck by lightning, plugging in the kettle in the pavilion. If she won the Lottery, she would join the Barmy Army and follow England around the world for as long as the money lasted, though if anyone wanted to pay her for dispatches home, she'd do it for longer!

Sarah's son is undertaking a a photojournalism project in Kosovo and Syria with a group working with young people who are refugees. You can follow his blog at newexposure.blogspot.com