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author
Sue Millard
I was born in Cheshire and moved to Cumbria in 1975. To begin with Garham and I had a little house in Shap then in 1983 we moved to what he calls "a very small hamlet at the end of the world." We h...view moreI was born in Cheshire and moved to Cumbria in 1975. To begin with Garham and I had a little house in Shap then in 1983 we moved to what he calls "a very small hamlet at the end of the world." We have a grown-up married daughter and a son, and two grandsons.
The farmhouse at Daw Bank was rebuilt in 1902 on the footprint of a 17th or 18th century house. From the windows I can see Roundthwaite Common, Birkbeck Fells and the magnificent Howgills, where local farms have rights to keep Fell ponies in the traditional manner - hence the topics of many of my books.
I brought up a family and in between times I designed embroidery canvases, painted murals and wrote poetry and sang in choirs and amateur operatics. For 14 years I made competition driving harness for horses and ponies while we farmed at Daw Bank. I was a regular contributor to Carriage Driving Magazine, was a cartoonist and wrote for the pony magazine Going Native until its closure in 1995 after which I contributed to its successor Native Pony.
I worked in further / higher education from 1997 to 2009 at Newton Rigg College, the University of Central Lancashire and the new University of Cumbria. I achieved a Masters degree in Multimedia Computing -- wait a minute, Literature AND Computing? Well -- why not? Writers don't have to be office bound. We should resist being pigeonholed, typecast or stereotyped! (See what I did there?)
Three of my books were published by "proper" publishing houses, One Fell Swoop (now in its 3rd edition), Against the Odds (J A Allen) and Hoofprints in Eden (Hayloft). I'd also been doing a good deal of editing and proofing, and managing web sites, and when I took voluntary redundancy in 2009 I decided I could be doing all this for my OWN books. So here we are: I'm still writing, still selling books.view less