About Kathleen Jones

Born and brought up on a hill farm in the north of England, Kathleen Jones escaped to London as a teenager in order to become a writer. She knew nothing about Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp until she found a copy of Katherine Mansfield's Journal in a second hand book shop and read it until the pages fell apart. It was the beginning of Kathleen's fascination with the New Zealand writer whose first name she shared. A teenage marriage and twenty seven addresses in ten years, meant that Kathleen identified very strongly with Mansfield's nomadic life and the struggle to find space to write.

Kathleen spent several years in Africa and the Middle East - where she worked in English broadcasting - before returning home. She read law and then English Literature as a mature student at university before specialising in early women writers - work that culminated in A Glorious Fame, the life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Her extensive published work includes radio journalism, articles for magazines and newspapers, short fiction and eleven books - a mixture of biography, general non-fiction and two poetry collections.

Now living in Cumbria, Kathleen's passion for Katherine Mansfield has at last found expression in a biography, which she has been working on for several years, visiting New Zealand and gathering research material from hundreds of sources. Kathleen's work 'is characterised by an ability to select and extract details from her research and use them to paint a coherent portrait of her subject, bringing them vividly to life. She crafts strong stories from real events leaving you with a feeling that you know and understand the subject of the biography'.

The Author outside
Isola Bella, Menton, France

Her publications include:

'Margaret Forster: An Introduction' was published by Northern Lights in 2003 and is a short monograph on the life and work of Margaret Forster. There is also a series of books on Alternative Rites and Ceremonies of marriage, birth and death under the name Kate Gordon.

She has published poetry, feature articles and short fiction in a variety of national and international magazines and newspapers . Her short stories have also been broadcast on Radio Four and on radio networks in Holland, Germany and Spain. She was one of the featured authors in the recent 'Save our Short Story Anthology' compiled by the Arts Council on the internet. Her latest fiction is available at www.route-online.com in a e-publication called 'Brief Lives' edited by Susan Tranter as well as the anthology Route Offline.

A prize-winning, collection of poetry 'Unwritten Lives' was published by Redbeck Press in 1995 and a further collection 'Secret Eden' was exhibited as part of a collaborative project for Visual Arts Year 97 with landscape photographer Tony Riley.

Kathleen Jones is a regular performer at Literature Festivals all over Britain and leads creative writing workshops for fiction, poetry and life writing. She is also a tutor for the Open University's new creative writing programme and currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.

Further information at: www.kathleenjones.co.uk