About Vanessa
Vanessa is a solicitor specialising in EU law who has worked in private practice in London and Brussels and for the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
After taking early retirement from the legal profession she turned her hand to fiction.
She lives in Hampstead and likes wine, walking and music of many sorts. And of course reading and writing.
Q & A
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Yes. I’ve always written. I had a couple of short stories published in my teens then turned to legal writing when I was in practice, including a turgid tome (200,000 words!) on EC company law which I’m sure would have sold better if the proof reader hadn’t picked up an error in the title …
But I’d always wanted to write a novel and once my son was settled in college I moved from full-time practice to freelance legal translation and started a novel called Some Like It Cold, which later became The Grass Widow.
What is your writing routine?
I work best in the morning, whether before or after a long walk on Hampstead Heath with my Border Collie Elvis during which I do a lot of creative thinking.
And when I moved from being in an office five days a week to WFH (before it was WFH!) and starting my novel, I treated myself to a treadmill desk so I could stop sitting hunched over a keyboard.
Did you take any writing courses?
Yes. I started Some Like It Cold on the Penguin Random House Constructing a Novel course, which was an excellent brief introduction to fiction writing, and completed the first draft – with a lot of help from my fellow students, several of whom became good friends – on the Faber Academy Work in Progress course.
Read about the eight albums which mean the most to me here >