About

My story

Author · Content Creator · Collaborator

Once upon a time, Karen professed to be a career teacher. She was head of a primary, days packed with curriculum, standards, and the particular chaos that only a school can hold. It was a life she was good at — and one she thought she would keep.

Then, at 40, she had a son, and the plot changed. The whirlwind of leadership gave way to nights and nappies and the strange, quiet hours of being at home. English had always been her passion, but for the first time she was writing for herself, not for classrooms.

Lockdown arrived, as it did for everyone, and with it a need to put the mess of parenting somewhere it could breathe. She began The Unyoung Mum: parenting stories, spectacular fails, and the honest bits in between. The blog became therapy — a way to find her voice on the page, and to remember that she was still a person as well as a mum.

When school started again, she took a leap. Novel writing. Stories about complicated women, ambition, friendship, and the courage to begin again. She wrote as if catching up with a self she had parked for years.

Now she has representation. Hands is out on submission. Subscribe to Me is close behind. Expired is in the editing chair. Three books, three different doors into the same question: what do we hold, what holds us, and what do we finally let go?

Alongside the novels she is a content creator and collaborator — still the woman who started a blog in lockdown, still the teacher who loved English, still a mum who knows that the interesting part of a life often starts after the plan falls apart.

This is the long way round. Teaching. Home. The blog. The books. The through-line is the same: telling the truth about women who are trying, failing, beginning again, and somehow finding the next sentence.