Kate Mildenhall

'Like so many young bookish kids I wrote verbose poems and scribbled stories and filled pages of journals with dreams. But even though I adored writing, I still knew that being a real-life writer was a dream both magnificent and impossible.

‘At different times I harboured the possibility that it might work. When I was thirteen, I wrote a story that was published in a collection and when I held the REAL BOOK in my hands I had my first thrilling taste of publication. At seventeen, I told my school careers teacher I wanted to enroll in a creating writing degree for university, but she laughed and told me