About Emily
I was born in Stoke-on-Trent, UK and I came back to live here about twenty years ago. In between, I had studied mathematics at Oxford, science, society and technology at East London, and cello in Cardiff and worked as a bookseller, an accountant, a musician and a tutor. I also spent many years as a carer.
In my writing, and in my life, I’m interested in hidden patterns and assumptions that shape how we live. I’m particularly fascinated by how they change over time, establishing new norms and leaving many old habits – both good and bad – forgotten in their wake. I wonder how they affect our sense of purpose and of identity; we feel we are part of a culture of some sort, but do we know what it is?
I also love the great fun of being human: all the emotions you can feel, the work you can do, the pastimes you can engage with, using your body and developing your heart, mind and spirit.
I enjoy books, cooking, the garden, knitting, music, old films, daily exercise, dancing and many other things, but recently I spend most of the time when I am not writing or running Castle Sefton Press practising and developing my artwork.
When I started writing I found that the place where I lived was the thing that brought all my ideas together. Stoke-on-Trent – once ‘The Potteries’, being a concentration of ceramic industries – is a unique city in that it is not really a city at all; it comprises six towns that grew until they touched and were eventually incorporated as a city. It is also part of a conurbation with two other towns that did not want to join.
Despite the efforts of successive local government administrations, and the erection of numerous signs to the contrary, there is no city centre, and strangers seeking this mythical hub will travel round in confusing and infuriating loops to nowhere.
Life here is not quite like that in other cities I have lived in and has much to recommend it, despite the place’s evident poverty and dereliction. It’s an interesting prism through which to view our industrial history and our present society.
My first novel, Ghost Train, was directly inspired by a local place, The Wedgwood Memorial College in the village of Barlaston, which was run by Stoke-on-Trent City Council. The main college buildings comprised two large villas that have stood empty and increasingly dilapidated since the college closed.
When I found out that one of Britain’s most brutal twentieth-century murders took place in one of those villas before it became part of the college, the idea for the book came into my mind.
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