Hello! I'm Amanda, a writer and Escalator 2023/24 and Laura Kinsella Foundation mentorship winner.​I was born and bred in rural Suffolk and have been an obsessive reader and writer since I was a child (thanks entirely to Stowmarket library and the mobile library bus).​
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At nineteen, I left Suffolk’s wide horizons to study a BA in Writing & Media at Middlesex University, graduating with first-class honours in 2004. But I couldn’t stay away for long. After some backpacking, I returned to Suffolk and found writing work in marketing and public relations. Then, seventeen years later, as a forty-year-old mother and freelance copywriter, the urge to write fiction resurfaced with a vengeance, and I returned virtually to Middlesex University to complete an online MA in Novel Writing. I graduated with a distinction.​

I'm now hard at work completing the novel I started on my master's degree and continued with support from the National Centre for Writing's talent development scheme, Escalator, and my mentor, Ashley Hickson-Lovence. My polyphonic novel, The Spinney, focuses on five very different women in a small village in conservative rural England. Through their intersecting lives, I've delved into issues of gender, class and inequality to explore how oppressive norms and narratives affect women here — and what the pressure to conform can lead them to repress. 

I'm also writing essays and articles related to my novel's subject matter, which you will be able to find links to below as and when I share them. If any of this sounds interesting to you, please get in touch! I'd love to hear from you.