ANGIE NORTHEY

I spent 35 years of my other life as a telecoms engineer, but all of my life devising plots and ideas for many novels. My first stab at writing was at the age of 11, when I was inspired by the 1981 TV adaptation of 'Brideshead Revisited'. It was about a similar romp around a stately home, but unsurprisingly, not up to Evelyn Waugh's standards. I remember falling madly in love with Anthony Andrews, and ironically I worked in his house in Belgravia 20-years later, installing a telephone line. Sadly, he wasn't there at the time.

I was born, and have lived and worked in London all my life. My education was woeful, typical of most working-class kids of  '70's, and I could barely read when I left secondary school. I managed to drag myself through the sixth form and two years at Brixton College, before working for BT as an engineer where I was the only woman working with two hundred blokes!

I know it sounds like an old cliché, but my education started when I left school, and I truly have been attending the University of Life ever since.

I am  now divorced with two beautiful sons, and after the birth of my youngest son in 2009, I took a slightly more sedate role within BT, when I managed to convince myself to start writing down some of the ideas for novels that I have had clanging around in my brain for the past 40-odd years. I thought it was better to drag them out before the menopause and then dementia kick in.

My novels are almost all set in the past, as I'm what I describe as a history nut, and they're all set in my beloved London, so they unite my two passions. They are all seen from a working-class female point of view and feature the very lowest and down trodden of society. Servants and prostitutes, or victims of cruelty or abuse, while accurately portraying London history at the same time.

I hope to give these, so far, voiceless under-class a real voice in a meticulously researched, authentic, and un-sanitised depiction of history.

I hope you enjoy some of the yarns that I have devised, for they are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, very adult, and above all entertaining.