"My two years and a term at the Perse were perhaps the happiest of my life: I’d had such a miserable time at my previous school that I refused to go back. I loved my A level subjects, our teachers were wonderful (Margaret Chamberlain, exceptional) and we even had a superb drama teacher. I had several close friends there already and being in the city centre, made full use of the university: singing in Trinity Hall Chapel Choir, attending free lunchtime concerts, sneaking into occasional lectures or seminars and in my last Perse term playing the girl in the Footlights panto opposite Clive Anderson’s Buttons. Almost all my novels take place in or around Cambridge. My last, An Elegant Solution, is a literary thriller set in the University, and twenty-year-later sequel to Cambridge-based On Our Own, loosely a sequel to my first (in London and Norfolk), The Lost Child. My third, A Fine and Private Place, moves out into the Cambridgeshire countryside. I hope to bring out the next, Never Too Late, next year followed by the last (in this particular trilogy), The Fox. I regularly contribute to Thought for the Day on Radio 4's Today Programme and as a freelance writer to the national press, as well writing award-winning poetry (most recently published in The London Magazine), song lyrics and my first play." Photo credit: Serena Atkins