Catherine George

Catherine George was born in a village on the Welsh-English border, where the public library featured largely in her life. Her mother, who looked upon literature as a basic necessity of life, fervently encouraged Catherine's passion for reading, little knowing it would one day motivate her daughter into writing her first novel.

At 18, Catherine met a future Engineer, who had set in a pendant a gold sovereign, that his grandmother put in his hand when he was born, and Catherine have never taken off since. After their marriage he swept her off to Brazil, where he worked as Chief Engineer of a large gold-mining operation in the mountains of Minas Gerais, a setting which later provided a very popular background for several of Catherine's early novels. Nine happy years passed there before the question of their small son's education decided their return to Britain. Not long afterward a daughter was born, and for a time Catherine lived a fulfilled life as a wife and mother who always made time to read, especially in the bath!

Her husband's job took him abroad again, to Portugal, West Africa, and various countries of the Middle East, but this time she stayed home with the family. And spent a lot of lonely evenings in between the reunions when her husband came home on leave. "Instead of reading other people's novels all the time," he suggested one day, "why not have a shot at writing one yourself?" So Catherine did.

But first she took a creative writing course. Encouraged by the other students' enthusiasm for her contributions, she decided to try her hand at romance, and read countless Mills & Boon novels as research before writing one herself. Her first novel was accepted in 1982, which Romantic Times voted best of its genre for that year, along with more than sixty written since.

These days son and daughter have fled the nest, but they return with loving regularity to where Catherine and her husband back for good from his travels live, with Prince, the most recent Labrador, in a house built at the end of Victoria's reign in four acres of garden on the cliffs between the beautiful Wye Valley and the River Severn.