Aboutme

KATIE FFORDE

`Trisha Ashley writes with remarkable wit and originality - one of the best writers around!'

Trisha Ashley - Biography

Trisha Ashley was born in St Helens, Lancashire and studied architectural glass at Swansea Art College. Since then she has supported her writing habit by taking on a diverse series of part-time jobs, including working for a lead light maker and plumber and painting portraits. She has now given up her fascinating but time consuming hobbies of divorce and house moving and settled in North Wales, though her only claim to the area is a Welsh grandmother. The combination of her Celtic creative streak and her typically Lancashire dark sense of humour in adversity has made her what she is today...whatever that is.
      Trisha writes occasional articles and stories, has many years' experience of manuscript assessment (she is part of the www.storytracks.net team) and has judged short story and novel competitions.
      She loves exploring food, gardens and old houses and these preoccupations are a recurring theme in her novels. When she has a little spare time, Trisha loves to walk on the nearby beach or stroll around the world-famous Bodnant Gardens, and also paints, mainly in oils.
     Trisha has written eleven romantic comedies and Avon HarperCollins will publish her twelfth, The Magic of Christmas, in October 2011. Her last novel, Twelve Days of Christmas, was a Sunday Times bestseller and A Winter's Tale and Wedding Tiers have been previously shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan award for romantic comedy. Every Woman for Herself was last year voted one of the top three romantic novels of the last fifty years.
      She has also written a Regency novel, Lord Rayven's Revenge, which was published by Hale. (She always knew her extensive collection of Regency newspapers would come in useful one day!)    In Lord Rayven's Revenge she combined a deep interest in the early Gothic novel with her fascination for Regency England, creating a lively and unforgettable literary heroine.
      Trisha Ashley is a member of the Society of Authors and the Welsh Academi.
     As to how she got published, Trisha says: "I wasn't an overnight success, by any means! For years I submitted manuscripts of satirical novels to publishers and received rave rejections, saying they thought my writing was hysterically funny (hopefully in a good way...) though they just couldn't see quite how to market it. But then I had the great good fortune to be taken on by literary agent Judith Murdoch, who immediately put her finger on the problem.
      'Trisha, this romantic comedy hasn't got any romance in it at all,' she informed me succinctly. 'Go away and put some in.'
      So I did, and soon my first romantic comedy, Good Husband Material, was published.
     And the greatest asset any writer can have? Trisha says: 'Apart from a wonderful agent, the answer has to be good friends, without a doubt!'

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