Welcome to my poetry website. I have been writing all my life, as a journalist, BBC TV documentary producer, creative writing academic Royal Literary Fund fellow, novelist and poet.

My latest poetry collection is Wish - new and selected poems (Greenwich Exchange) 2025. This gathers together work from my six previous collections – about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love – alongside bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world.

This is how it all happened: first my pamphlet Quintana Roo was published by Acumen Publications in 2003 and then my first full collection, Lipstick, was published in 2007 by Greenwich Exchange. In 2010 a collection of  pocket-sized poems, petite, was published by Hearing Eye and in 2011, Oversteps Books published Ally Pally Prison Camp, the story of 3,000 civilians imprisoned at Alexandra Palace during the First World War told through a historical collage of poems, photos, paintings and extracts from memoirs and letters.

Sancti Clandestini – Undercover Saints, a fully illustrated poetry collection was published in 2012 by Ward-Wood Publishing. An exhibition to accompany the book was held at The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden. My fifth collection Degrees of Twilight came out in July 2015, and my sixth, everlove in 2021, both published by The London Magazine Editions.

I returned to my first love of poetry after a career spanning many other forms of writing. After an English degree at Cardiff University I became a newspaper reporter, moving to BBC TV as a documentary writer / producer / director.

My poetry has appeared widely in international magazines and anthologies, and has escaped the page into a mobile phone app, choreography, BBC Radio 4, readings and festivals. I have judged international poetry competitions for Ver poets, Torriano, Barnet, Ware poets and Segora.

My two historical fiction novels The Prisoner’s Wife and Acts of Love and War were published by Penguin Random House, in 2020 and 2022, under the name Maggie Brookes.

As well as being a writer I am a compulsive reader, hopeful gardener, dreadful cook, besotted grandmother and a Londoner to the bone, though I love to swim in the sea.