About Catherine

I was born and still live in London, some people might think that’s unadventurous but there’s still so much about the city I don’t know and it’s always changing. I like a lot of the really old things like Wilton’s Music Hall in the city and the new things like the gherkin building and the millenium bridge. Also I like the fact that I’ve seen more wildlife in London than in the country – foxes at 9.00am in Waterloo, kestrels in my back garden in Hackney and cormorants swimming up the canal. Most of all what makes London special is the people here from everywhere else. I like the 24hour hot bagel shop and the Turkish restaurants in Dalston, my son loves Jamaican fried dumplings and I like the Portuguese restaurants in Stockwell. It’s the mix up that’s good, old and new Cornelissens art shop that sells dragon blood in a jar and The Algerian Coffee shop in Old Compton Street. The City farms, my local, Hackney, of course and Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest. Isn't that enough?

My parents were good storytellers. My dad was from Jamaica and my mum was Welsh. this is a picture of them just before they got married in North Wales in 1954. I was born in 1962 and mixed race families were still very unusual, especially in the suburbs. I went to school at Tetherdown primary school in north London. I loved it. I was good at school and if you’d have asked me then I’d have said I’d be a writer. But I hated secondary school. It was a very old fashioned girls school that soon squashed it out of me. I don’t expect any of my teachers would believe I would ever write enough words to make a book.

Then I went to art college. I had a great time at St. Martin’s in London (again) where I studied film, and when I left in the mid eighties the pop video thing was just taking off, however I got pregnant. Which was lucky as spending all night lighting people to make them look, less fat, less big headed or just less was not for me. This is really when I started reading. I used to take my kids to the library and read the teenage fiction. Nina Bawden,, Alan Garner, and sadly and less eruditely Ruby Ferguson. (If you don’t know she wrote really daft fifties pony books). I did have a pony at the time, she was bought with film development money from Tyne Tees (a north east TV company) but the film never got made. Spangles was piebald and very pretty. Like a lot of film stars she was cast for looks rather than ability and I had her for two years when she lived at Hackney City Farm.

So I started writing. And I’d like to think I’m getting better. But of course I’m not JK Rowling and so like most writers I have to do a lot of stuff. I’ve done writer in resident stints in schools and in Holloway Prison, I've been Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the London Institute, I mentor writers all over Africa for the British Council and I have run writing groups for teenagers in London. I was also lucky enough to be a judge for Booktrust's Teenage fiction prize in 2003, I recieved huge boxes of books and it was like Christmas.

I do a lot of school visits doing creative writing workshops for Years 6-11. I like talking to people and reading minds - something I learnt from writing Stella - and persuading people that being able to write stories is a totally different skill to writing essays. In the last year I've visitied schools in Croydon, St. Albans, Berkhamstead, Kenton and North Wales

And finally I made it back to the screen.  I was offered a job co-writing a screenplay for a feature film which was shot in Hackney. I had to think hard about taking the job, but the films' heart is good. And it helped that the director was my next door neighbour. It's called Bullet Boy and it stars Ashley Walters - Asher D of So Solid Crew. Ashley is great in it, as were all the actors, and Hackney looks beautiful! We have been really lucky ad the film has had some brilliant reviews. Films are so much a team effort and I was very lucky to be part of such a hard working crew.