Elizabeth Brooks grew up in a book-loving, story-telling family in Chester. Ever since visiting Haworth Parsonage at the age of 13 she has wanted to be a novelist, and has written numerous opening paragraphs in her time (ruining many a pristine notebook in the process).

Between 1998 and 2001 she read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. On graduating, she married and moved to the Isle of Man, where she still lives with her husband and two children. Over the years she has plugged away at her writing, finally managing to get beyond the first few hundred words in order to complete Call of the Curlew.

Her hobbies include painting, playing the violin (lurking at the back of the second violins in the Isle of Man Symphony Orchestra and miming the difficult bits) and most of all reading – preferably novels with a hint of the gothic.