I was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, a city of hills, grand Georgian squares and townhouses, dark medieval closes and wynds, with an extinct volcano looming above it like a sleeping lion. I love the drama of Scottish landscapes and the legacy of multi-faceted Scottish writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom I felt a special connection from childhood, as my grandfather – like his – was minister of Colinton parish church. I write about nineteenth-century literature and culture, most recently about Victorian female detectives in real life and on the nineteenth-century stage and page. I also publish journalism on books, arts and travel. I have written articles on traveling to Transylvania by train, in the footsteps of Jonathan Harker in Dracula; on attending a Viennese ball without a boyfriend ('Balls without Men'); on learning to cook in Paris ('Cooking for Love in Paris'); and on being a fifth wheel at the Cannes Film Festival ('Those who Do Cannes'). My fiction is a mixture of fairytale and comedy, typically set in a recognisably modern world, but one where elements of magic persist. I teach English Literature at the University of St Andrews, including a course on 'Speechwriting: History, Theory and Practice', which grew out of my own early experience as a speechwriter at the UN in New York.
