Er was eens...

I was born in a small, semi-rural mining town in Northumberland, UK. My parents took a pretty free-range approach to childrearing, so I spent my days romping around unsupervised in the local woods, climbing trees and paddling in the river.

I loved the outdoors, but my true passion was books. Even as a toddler, I was obsessed with words – reading them, writing them and playing with them.

At school, I excelled at English and enjoyed learning French, but when the French department at my high school proved lacking, I switched to Latin. Lessons were held in the Classics classroom, hidden away in at the top of an old, redbrick building that had once been a grammar school. To enter, you had to find the almost-invisible entrance to a dark, cramped staircase curling up to a room in the eaves. It felt like something out of Harry Potter, and those lessons were just as magical to me.