Caroline Rance - Biography

You know how when you leave University people encourage you to 'get a foot on the career ladder' by starting in a lowly job? I did that, but no one gave me that vital piece of advice: "Don't be indispensable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted." I proved too good at the rubbish stuff, so I spent several years in dead-end jobs, hanging on until I lost the will to live then moving to another equally dead-end job. Having messed about with lots of false starts at novels, I thought I'd better get my act together and finish one, otherwise I'd never achieve anything in life - so I went back to Kill-Grief.

I now stay at home looking after my little boy and working on my second book, which is about a struggling young sideshow exhibitor and a charlatan doctor in Victorian Liverpool.

Other than writing and motherhood, I spend time looking after my three Arab horses and the most bone-idle Staffie in the world.

I studied history for the next three years, and the research I undertook for my dissertation - about the early years of Chester Royal Infirmary - was the inspiration for Kill-Grief. While at university, I was also a founder member of the Keele Writers' Society, and churned out a fair bit of cruddy poetry. I started writing Kill-Grief in my final year, but it was a completely different story from a different character's point of view, and I rewrote the first few chapters loads of times before realising I had no idea what was going to happen next.

I was born in Bromborough, Wirral, in 1975, later moving to Irby and then to Buckinghamshire. I loathed school and school loathed me, so I won't say too much about that, but after scraping together a few A-Levels I went to Keele University in 1994.

A mistake on my UCAS form changed my life - I ended up on Keele's 'Foundation Year' course, which meant I could attend lectures in loads of different subjects before deciding what to study for my degree - it was during that year I realised I wanted to study history as well as English Literature. I'd never much liked history at school - the GCSE syllabus was all 20th Century, which wasn't really my thing, so I didn't know how interesting it could be.

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