Margaret Nesbitt

 

2nd Place Runner-up in the 2012 'Flashy Shorts' Competition with her flash fiction entry Cup Football.

I am a woman fast approaching three score years and ten. Born and brought up on Tyneside, the eldest in a family of four girls, I travelled to Sunderland for my education in a Convent Grammar School. After our family had grown up and I’d retired from my work as a Probation Officer, my husband and I moved to live in a two hundred year old cottage overlooking the sea on the wild and wonderful Northumberland coast.

I have told and written stories as long as I can remember, but only began to write in earnest in recent years. Encouraged and tutored by my husband I had several short stories published and also read some of my work on local radio. In 2008 and after forty-five years of marriage I lost my mentor to the monster that is cancer so, to fill the gap as I ploughed through grief, I enrolled and successfully completed a Master’s Degree in creative writing. I have now completed my first novel; this follows the story of my great, great grandmother, before, during and after the famine in nineteenth century Ireland.