I was born in 1950, the second of six children and

grew up in London and South West Scotland. I

went to Oxford University in 1968; I studied English and (more importantly) discovered feminism, socialism, Christianity and

friendship, which have proved the bedrock of my

adult life.

I always wanted to be a writer – and in 1972 Faber

published some early short stories in a series they

then called Introduction. I joined a wonderful

feminist writing group with Zoe Fairbairns, Valerie

Miner, Michele Roberts, and Michelene Wandor

and we wrote Tales I Tell My Mother. This enabled

me to write my first novel Daughter of Jerusalem,

which won the Somerset Maugham Award in

1978. Since then I have been a writer. Mostly I write about women and the entangled emotions of terror and beauty. I use a lot of old stories from diverse traditions – fairy stories, myths and folk tales. I am a deeply committed (Roman Catholic) Christian, and that also informs my work. Short stories are my favourite genre, but I also write novels and non-fiction.

I was a vicar’s wife for over twenty years and have two grown up children: Polly Lee is an actress in New York and Adam Lee is just breaking into a career as a photographer, he took all the photographs on this site and did the cover of A Book of Silence

                                        For the last ten years though, I have been living on

                                        my own and pursuing a deep and joyful fascination

                                        with silence.  Last year I built a little house on a wild

                                        moor in northern Galloway. Now I live up here with

                                        Zoe, a sort of border terrier. At present she rather

                                        reduces the silence, but she keeps me fit and I

                                        expect she will calm down when she grows up. My

                                        nearest neighbours are a household of Barn Owls

                                        who occupy an owl box in a nearby ruined barn. I am

                                        beginning to think about what sort of garden I might make on a high               windswept moor where the soil is a discouraging

                                        mixture of peat bog over clay with chunks of extruding granite. Here I write and pray and walk

and am happy.

In Scottish Journey (1935) Edwin Muir described the moor where I live:

    "It is difficult to give any impression of that beautiful and almost quite solitary stretch of moorland which lies between Newton Stewart and the bleak village of Barrhill in the south of Ayrshire. For about twenty miles I can remember seeing only two houses. On every side the moorland flowed away in low waves to the horizon, except where it was broken, far away in the east, by the dark mountains of Galloway. There was no sign of life, except for a few distant sheep nibbling the harsh tufts of grass that grew here and there among the heather; even the birds did not seem to come here, and the only sound I heard was one of a lark singing high up. The thin air was sweetened by a thousand scents rising into it from every tuft in these miles of moorland, mingling as they rose, so that one seemed to be breathing in the landscape itself, drinking it in with all one's senses except that of hearing, which was magically stilled. The silence of such places is so complete that it sinks into one's mind in waves, making it clearer and clearer, drenching it as with a potion concocted out of some positive life-giving essence, not out of the mere absence of sound. In that silence the moor was a living thing spreading its fleece of purple and brown and green to the sun. As I sat in the heather, breathing in the perfume, it seemed to me that I could feel new potentialities of nature working in this scene, secrets that I had never known or else had quite forgotten: perhaps they were merely memories of childhood, when one is capable being alone with nature as one can rarely be in later years, and is more clearly aware of its powers. There was not one contour, one variation of colour which did not suggest peace and gladness; and the loneliness and silence surrounding the moor were like a double dream enclosing it and making it safe, one might have thought, for ever."