KATHLEEN JONES was born and brought up on a hill farm in Cumbria. She has been writing since she was a child and has published fourteen books including eight biographies, two novels, a collection of short stories set in Italy, and three volumes of poetry. She lived for ten years in Africa and the Middle East, where she worked for the Qatar Broadcasting Corporation. Since then she has written extensively for BBC radio and contributed to several television documentaries. She also writes non-fiction under the name Kate Gordon.
Kathleen was appointed as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow in 2007. Her acclaimed biography of Katherine Mansfield ‘Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller’ was published by Penguin NZ and Edinburgh University Press in 2010. Her latest biographies are ‘Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet’ and a new ‘Readers’ Guide’ to the life and work of Margaret Forster, called ‘Margaret Forster: A Life in Books’. Her novel ‘The Sun’s Companion’ was published in 2012 followed by ‘The Centauress’, which is set in Istria. A collection of poetry ‘Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21’, published by Templar Poetry, won the 2011 Straid Award and her latest collection, written partly on the Pacific islands of Haida Gwaii, is called ‘The Rainmaker’s Wife’, published by Indigo Dreams in 2017.
She is best known for her award-winning biographies and poetry, but has also published feature articles and short fiction in a variety of national and international magazines and newspapers. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio and on radio networks in Holland, Germany and Spain. She was one of the featured authors in the recent ‘Save our Short Story Anthology’ compiled by the Arts Council on the internet. As a journalist Kathleen has written articles and reviews for the Independent, the Guardian, the Daily Express, and the TLS, as well as magazines such as SHE and Cosmo.
Kathleen Jones is an enthusiastic blogger, writing an on-line journal ‘A Writer’s Life’ and a book review blog. She is part of the ‘Tuesday Poem’ group, based in New Zealand. Kathleen regularly leads creative writing workshops for fiction, poetry and life writing.
