Growing up in a small town just outside London, Keren David had two ambitions: to write a book and to live in the big city. Several decades on, she has finally achieved both. She was distracted by journalism, starting out at 18 as a messenger girl, then working as a reporter, news editor,...
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Growing up in a small town just outside London, Keren David had two ambitions: to write a book and to live in the big city. Several decades on, she has finally achieved both. She was distracted by journalism, starting out at 18 as a messenger girl, then working as a reporter, news editor, features editor and feature writer for national newspapers and magazines. Along the way she lived in Glasgow and Amsterdam, where in eight years she learned enough Dutch to order coffee and buy fruit and vegetables. Returning to London in 2007 she signed up for a creative writing course at City University. When I Was Joe, her first novel, started out as a plot-planning exercise. It's about a 14-year-old boy who is given a new identity when he is taken into police protection after witnessing a crime. Keren says: "Unlike the US, witness protection isn't a well-established programme in the UK. I was drawn to the idea of writing about a boy with a false identity because it's such an interesting metaphor for the changes that being a teenager brings."
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