Kathleen Jones

Born and brought up on a hill farm in the north of England, Kathleen Jones spent several years in Africa and the Middle East (where she worked in English broadcasting) before returning home. Her published work includes broadcast journalism, articles for magazines such as She and Cosmopolitan, short fiction and 17 books — a mixture of biography, fiction and two poetry collections.

Kathleen’s biographies include A Passionate Sisterhood (Virago) — an account of the lives of the women who lived with the ‘Lake Poets’ — which won the Barclays Bank prize for non-fiction; Learning Not to be First: the life of Christina Rossetti (Oxford University Press), which was Doris Lessing’s book of the year; a biography of Katherine Mansfield The Story-teller (Penguin and Edinburgh University Press); and most recently a biography of the poet Norman Nicholson The Whispering Poet, written to celebrate his centenary in 2014. Her first novel The Sun’s Companion was published in 2012, and her poetry collection Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 (Templar) won the 2012 Straid award.

Kathleen’s partner is a sculptor working in Italy and she divides her time between Cumbria and the marble mountains of Carrara where she is working on a series of short stories set in an Italian village. She leads creative-writing workshops and tutors residential courses in the UK and abroad, with a particular focus on auto/biography and digital publishing.