About
I was born in Launceston, Tasmania, and raised by my maternal grandmother and her sisters. These three formidable women taught me the power of the written word and instilled in me a love of reading. As an only child, I could escape into the different worlds books offered me, and soon began to make up my own stories, and imagined that one day I might write a book. However, a great deal was to happen to me before I attempted my first novel.
I was brought to England to finish my education, and discovered that I had a lot to learn. New surroundings, new rules and regulations, and elderly spinster ladies in charge of lessons who were determined to rid me of my larrikin ways and ‘ghastly colonial accent’. But I survived school – just – and even managed to discount a particular teacher’s opinion that I’d never make it as an author, much less get a job behind a shop counter. I do hope she now knows how wrong she was, for there’s nothing like scorn to make me more determined to succeed.
Marriage and children followed a short and unexciting career as a secretary, and it wasn’t until they’d flown the nest that I finally had time to sit down and write the story of my family. That took two years and ended up in the dustbin, but it proved I was capable of writing a novel, and from that moment I never looked back.
Two thrillers and thirteen multi-generational sagas later, Tamara McKinley’s Australian novels were being sold world-wide and translated into twenty different languages. This might sound as if it was an easy task, but I changed publishers several times along the way, and there were moments when I doubted my ability to come up with more stories. But then a change came about when Penguin approached my agent, Teresa Chris, and asked if I’d like to write a series set on the South coast of England in a boarding house during WW2.
With a new name and a rather more gentle genre to contend with, the Cliffehaven series was born with the release of There’ll be Blue Skies. I assumed – wrongly as it happens – that there would be one book for each year of the war, but here I am twelve years later and twenty books on, still following the Reilly family who live in Beach View Boarding House.
This family has become so familiar to me now, that although they are figments of my imagination, they feel very real, and I feel blessed that I was given the opportunity to write about them. The research was painstaking, but I learnt a huge amount about the second World War along the way, and bow in admiration to those brave little battlers who stayed behind to work in the factories and keep the home fires burning whilst their husbands fought abroad and their children were fostered out far from home.
The theme of family, and of the intricate threads which bind people together or tears them apart is fascinating, and I love watching my characters evolve throughout the series. They are the ones who tell me their stories, and as long as I keep listening to them, the stories will keep on coming.
I love working out the story, plotting it so that you the reader can follow the characters through the trials and tribulations they must go through before reaching a satisfactory conclusion. The writing does get harder as the years roll by, but that’s probably because I’m very aware of the pitfalls, and also that sometimes it feels as if I’m knitting fog, but having written THE END, the real joy is in the editing. With the story complete, it’s great to go through it again to turn out all the things that shouldn’t be there, and to make it as good and polished as possible.
Do please let me know what you think about this website, and about the Cliffehaven series. I’d love to hear from you.
Ellie Dean.
