Most recently she has sailed the southern ocean from Falklands to South Georgia and then crossed the island in the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Among many adventures she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, trekked in Pakistan, Ladakh and Bhutan, followed the Silk Route through Asia, worked on a research station in Antarctica, sailed the Atlantic, explored in Chile, and competed in a classic car rally from Peking to Paris. Rosie lives and writes in London, but she is also a keen traveller, mountaineer and skier. She has been writing full time ever since, and that first novel has been followed by a score of others. Her first book was published in 1982, shortly after the birth of her daughter.

To write a novel seemed the more promising of the options open to her. She still feels a debt to the remarkable women who taught her, and who encouraged her to think for herself.Īfter a few years of working in women’s magazines and for a publisher, and by now married to a literary agent, Rosie found herself at home with a new baby son and no job. Rosie read English at St Hilda’s College Oxford, and for the first time in her life felt that she was in the right place at the right time. To feel an outsider and to be immersed in books was the ideal apprenticeship for a writer. She found the library instead … and read, and read.

The school had a strong tradition of music and games, but unfortunately Rosie had no aptitude for hockey and no enthusiasm for Gilbert and Sullivan choruses. To research it Rosie travelled extensively in Ladakh and Kashmir, following the threads of the pashmina shawl trade across the Himalayas to the lakes and alleyways of Srinagar.īorder Crossing is the story of Rosie’s entry, with Phil Bowen, in the 1997 Peking to Paris vintage and classic car rally.Rosie Thomas was born and grew up in a small village in north Wales.Īfter winning a scholarship, she became a boarder at Howell’s School. Her most recent book is The Kashmir Shawl(HarperCollins £12.99). To research the Antarctic background to Sun at Midnight Rosie spent a month living with the scientists on a Bulgarian research station on Livingstone Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. It won the Romantic Novel of the Year award. Iris and Ruby is set in wartime Cairo and features a grandmother and granddaughter perilously lost in a sandstorm in the desert. White is about an attempt to climb Everest and was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature.

Reflecting her interest in climbing, mountaineering and adventure travel, several of the novels have exotic settings. Under her pseudonym Rosie Thomas, Janey King has written twenty-one novels and a travel book.

Sun at Midnight by Rosie Thomas