Avril Joy was born and brought up on the Somerset Levels. She's spent time living in London and East Anglia but after a long sojurn in the North East, where both her children were born, she now considers it to be her home. The majority of her working life, before she became a full-time writer, was spent teaching and managing in a women's prison on the outskirts of Durham city. Women came in and out of prison and were frequently concerned when they came back in to see her still there - 'You're doing a longer sentence than any of us Miss,' was the usual refrain. But it didn't feel like that, on the contrary she believes it was a privelege to work there and is interested in working with prisoners in a different way in the future.As well as her writing Avril loves her garden and gardens generally, is interested in Art History which she studied at University, also travel and the way landscape shapes us and hold memory. She enjoys blogging at www.avriljoy.com. is less enthusiatic about Twitter and has given Facebook a miss altogether.She writes both contemporary, literary fiction and crime and hopes to publish her first crime novel Blood Tide early 2012.