Here’s a little background to explain how my meandering career led me into writing fiction:

My writing career began in journalism and my reports appeared in New Scientist, The Guardian, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and Geographical, among others. I was educated at the University of East Anglia, where I studied environmental sciences, and at The Manchester School of Art, where I gained a Masters in Fine Art.

As a foreign correspondent I travelled widely in the Middle East, Africa and India, and spent a year overlanding through Egypt, Sudan and Kenya with my journalist husband, Garry. I now live on the Isle of Bute in Scotland.

Despite the many column inches of factual reporting, I didn’t consider writing fiction until near the end of my fine art studies. I started writing my first novel, on the quiet, between art projects and exhibitions.

My debut,  A Calculated Life, was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award 2013 and for The 2013  Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award.

My second novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind is set in the past, present and future. The research for this novel took me to Shanghai and Suzhou in China, and to Florence and Bologna in Italy. The Guardian included this novel in “Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2015.”

And my third novel, Dreams Before the Start of Time, won the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association 2017 Award for Best Novel.

I returned to the world of A Calculated Life in writing the novella The Enclave. This won the British Science Fiction Association 2017 Award for Best Short Fiction.

Bridge 108 is my fourth novel and is a companion novel to A Calculated Life. The two novels can be read in any order!

In 2017, I was delighted to become ‘interviewer in residence’ for the Arthur C. Clarke Award as part of the award’s collaboration with the Ada Lovelace Day. See The Ada Lovelace Conversations below!

Also worth mentioning:

In 2006, I helped to start a grassroots project in the village where I lived, with the aim of going carbon neutral as a community. We were fortunate to have the support of the University of Chester’s geography department, who monitored our carbon footprint over the next 10 years. It’s been amazingly successful and has gained huge media attention, even being featured on the front page of The New York Times. The Ashton Hayes Going Carbon Neutral Project resulted in individual households cutting their carbon footprint by between 25 percent and 40 percent, and that journey continues.