Deborah Bosley

Deborah Bosley’s writing career began in 1987 with The Rough Guide to California and The Rough Guide to San Francisco. An argument with the editor of the Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, about the weakness of state-educated English students (where she lied about her A-level grades) led to a regular slot reviewing for the publication throughout the 1990s.

She was encouraged to write her own book under the gentle mentorship of Alice Thomas Ellis and her first novel Let Me Count the Ways (Century, 1996) was runner-up for the Betty Trask Award. This was followed by The Common Touch (Century, 1998) and A Kind of Warfare (Duckworth, 2000). Bringing up her son stalled her concentration until 2007 when she moved into ghost-writing, which she found a fascinating process. Her own fourth novel was a stop-start affair for seven years until 2014 when she abruptly changed direction and began a cheerful tome about mental illness.

Other work has included journalism for the London Evening Standard, the Observer and New Statesman as well as a spell scouting for a Greek publisher. In between writing projects she has taught in a variety of institutions but on balance has preferred her stint as RLF Fellow at Oxford Brookes University over the two years she spent teaching in a young offenders’ institution. To date she has received no death threats at Brookes for suggesting the students get on with their work.