A Northumbrian now living in County Durham, Eliza started writing way back. She began with poems and stories for school magazines and plays for class performance. After a poetry-writing course at the Arvon Foundation sponsored by the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, she well and truly caught the writing bug. Reading English at Cambridge, she amassed notebooks of scribblings and later, as a teacher in Northumberland and Durham, tinkered at playwriting. She undertook research on oral storytelling in the classroom at the University of Durham, exploring children’s retellings of myth and traditional tale. Meetings with world tellers of tales influenced her writing.
As a lecturer at the University of Cumbria she continued to scratch poetry and stories on the backs of envelopes. She began to publish in poetry journals and self-published her first novel, Giving up Architecture, assisted by Seaglass Books, a former imprint of Cinnamon Press. She is a member of Sixpoets in Lancaster, a group of writing friends who talk and write poetry and who, for a time, organised poetry events.
She tramps and cycles about Durham from rock-crag to river-city to recovering coast, listening to poetry and pipes, song and theatre, stumbling upon stories and keeping eyes and nose peeled for buzzard, bee-orchid, blewit and the history washing over Blast Beach. And brooding on that sand trickling between our fingers...
@ElizaMood elizamoodnovelist.org