About J M Briscoe
J M Briscoe wrote her first novel hunched at the altar of an enormous Gateway computer monitor in the unheated basement of her family's "fixer-upper" home in Dartmouth, South Devon, when she was 12. Her parents had no idea and were, quite frankly, relieved to find out she wasn't getting up to anything more nefarious than penning the extremely melodramatic shenanigans of twins Sapphire and Samuel Zalo.
After composing several more histrionic tales (usually involving twins and someone dying extravagantly), Briscoe honed her craft enough to earn herself a place on an English and Creative Writing BA at Royal Holloway, University of London. Following graduation, her quest for a job with 'anything to do with writing' delivered a lucky break in the role of reporter for the Kingsbridge and Salcombe Gazette, part of the South Hams Newspapers group. Two years later, she went on to study a PgDip in Broadcast Journalism at Cardiff University.
Briscoe’s career as a journalist has spanned newspapers, radio stations, a little bit of TV, a lot of online reporting and several years as a B2B trades magazine reporter and editor. Her true passion, however, has always been writing fiction; when she switched to freelance journalism in order to focus more on her growing family, she also took the opportunity to write.
In 2016 her first Young Adult novel, The Thing About Amelia, was long-listed for the Mslexia Children’s Novel Competition. A few years later, while pregnant with her third child, Briscoe wrote the first novel in a soft sci-fi trilogy, The Girl with the Green Eyes. Following a revisit and edit during the first 2020 Coronavirus lockdown, she submitted it to The Bridport Prize annual competition and was thrilled when it was long-listed for The Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award, reaching the top 20 of more than 1,600 entries. The Girl with the Green Eyes will be published by Bad Press Ink on November 5th, 2021.
J M Briscoe lives in Wokingham, Berkshire, with her husband, three children and two fairly indifferent cats. She writes a light-hearted parenting blog entitled Fearless Worrier.
Jenny currently works as a Content Editor for Mumsnet.