Valerie Poore

Val Poore was born in London, England, and grew up in both north London and the west of Dorset. After completing her degree in English, History and French at Bournemouth, she took a further course in the conservation and restoration of museum artefacts at Lincoln College of Art. She then spent two years smallholding, rearing Jacobs sheep and doing furniture restoration before going to South Africa in 1981 with her husband and small children. Val left South Africa permanently in 2001 and has settled in the Netherlands, where she shares her time between a liveaboard barge in Rotterdam and a cottage in Zeeland. She has been writing since childhood and wrote stories, articles and radio plays for years before embarking on her first book in 2005. Val loves travelling on her barge, especially when it involves roughing it a bit. She feels that she has better adventures and more interesting experiences that way. She has written twelve books altogether: three novels and nine memoirs, three of which are about her life in South Africa, a country she grew to love deeply. The others are all about her experiences of living and cruising on her barge. The latest is being published in May, 2021. Then it'll be back to writing some more fiction. Val writes under her full name Valerie Poore. For more about Val's daily life on board her barge in Rotterdam, go to https://rivergirlrotterdam.blogspot.nl