The Lady in the Tower

Marie-louise Jensen

Marie-Louise Jensen in her own words: "At age 11, I possibly suffered severe psychological damage having to wait for a week to discover whether Aragorn survived the battle at Helm’s Deep. My family moved around a lot, and in 1979 we moved down to the Bath area, where I’ve been based (on and off) ever since. By late secondary school, I’d discovered there is a way of reading all day and calling it work. It’s called literature. I did A-levels in English, German and French followed by a degree in German and Scandinavian (with literature) at the University of East Anglia. I noticed all the books I’d read at school and uni were written by men. So I did a PhD at Bristol on German women writers to balance things up. The reading was great, but the thesis got me down and I never quite finished.

Between 1990 and 1995, I moved to Münster, Germany to teach English at the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität. My first son was born in Germany. Returning to England in 1995, I resolved that my two boys weren’t going to go to school unless they wanted to. At ages 12 and 9, they haven’t decided to yet. I’ve had endless fun reading them all my favourite children’s books and discovering new ones. I do waste some of their time with maths but I never confiscate their books. Our hobbies are lots of different sports - and going to book signings to meet children’s authors. I finally decided it was time to start writing books as well as reading them. I did an MA in creative writing at the Bath Spa University in 2004-5, and was fortunate enough to have my first novel accepted by an agent and a publisher soon after."