I was born in Beckenham, Kent in 1947. When people say "Kent -- the garden of England" they don't mean Beckenham, which was a dreary suburb of semi-detached houses at least in that part where I lived between the evocatively named Eden Park and Elmer's End (who Elmer was and how he met his end I have never discovered).  People were genteel in that oppressively lower middle class way that cultivates its own garden, washes its cars every Sunday, and keeps itself to itself. My poor mother, with whom I had a difficult enough relationship, was Danish, from a jolly family who liked to sit up all night drinking schnapps and playing cards. She might have suffocated in Beckenham. Instead she gave a Danish-style party every Christmas Eve, was never invited back, and finally took solace in religion. My father was comfortably large, lazy and smoked a pipe. He had his own car hire business (two cars) and, as an item in the local paper once said on the occasion of the firm's fiftieth anniversary, had driven such celebrities as Bob Monkhouse and Hugh Bean. Despite being touched with such glamour, however, I think he remained a disappointment to my mother.

I was a silent, sullen child. No wonder my mother preferred my much older sweet-natured sister, a nurse. I hated Beckenham and especially Beckenham Grammar School for Girls where we were expected to behave like young ladies. But this was the sixties. Rebellion was the order of the day and in my case extended to not wearing the school tie under my high-necked navy sweater.

Bright new Essex University welcomed the clever girl I was into its Comparative Studies department. An American professor with a deep brown voice talked me into learning Russian. At thirteen I had already read Dostoevsky's The Devils and had given up belief in God. I was thinking of studying politics or sociology but soon realised my brain wasn't analytical enough and plumped for literature. I fell in love with an Israeli poet much older than me, a neurotic man who nevertheless broadened my little suburban mind with his awareness of European culture and his artistic friends. He couldn't live in Colchester and got a flat in Belsize Park in north London. I used to stay there sometimes and after I graduated, I found a room nearby, at South End Green on the edge of Hampstead Heath. We'd spend our free time wandering round markets and bookshops, me thinking I looked dramatic in a long black coat and black hat and starving hungry because the poet never ate until afternoon and I was too intimidated (it didn't seem sufficiently spiritual) to munch in front of him.

I didn't want to be the teacher my mother was expecting me to become but failed to find better work than Dillons Bookshop. It was an enjoyable time, nonetheless -- lots of weird drop-outs took temporary residence there -- but I was getting nowhere. So I went back to Essex University to do a Ph.D on the Function of Quotation in Dostoevsky. My thesis failed to shake the academic world but gave me the opportunity to read lots of lovely books. I also went to Leningrad for four months as part of a British Council exchange programme. My father died suddenly when I was there and since my family only saw fit to write to me about it (post to the USSR taking weeks to arrive), by the time I found out, he was long dead and buried and there seemed little point in returning home, so I didn't. The bad daughter's reputation intact. On my return I found my mother had thrown out all my father's pipes.

Back in London I got a job with the British Council. In the meantime -- the Israeli poet and I having drifted amicably apart -- I had met the Irish journalist Des Crowley, who would eventually become my husband. This life-changing encounter was at a party where I knew no one except the friend who had brought me: Des tells me some of the Chieftains were there, including Paddy Moloney, but what did I know. Danish relations say that with my bare feet and long skirts I was their first hippie but the truth is I was living in something of a dream world all through the late sixties and early seventies: spaced out without taking drugs.

In the back-to-front way of those days, Des and I decided to have a baby together and moved into a flat in Wimbledon. Karl was born in June 1976 and I had six months maternity leave from the British Council, extended to twelve. Then Des got a job in Dublin and we moved there. I was pregnant again.

Was I writing? All the time but I never showed it to anyone.

I was miserable in Ireland for the first year and a half. I knew no one and couldn't make friends, since I was stuck at home with the baby in a rented house in a suburban street with squinting windows. As bad as Beckenham. Our new little girl, Louise, died at eleven weeks, a cot death. I didn't want to stay in the house afterwards and we bought our own place in Raheny, in a housing estate full of young families, and got married for tax reasons in England, in Bromley Registry Office, in case we ever wanted to get a divorce. (No divorce in Ireland at the time -- my dissident Russian friends had a merry laugh over that one when we visited them during the first defeated divorce referendum. A free country, indeed) At the wedding my mother smiled at last and invited us to spend our first legal night as a couple in her bed. No thanks, mum.

For the first time I felt good about Ireland. I had another girl, Jenny, in 1979 and three years later, Leo, the other artist in the family.

I was working part-time as a genealogist and also writing plays, novels and stories. My first novel entitled Sleepwalkers was set in Leningrad. It took me twelve years to write and was unpublishable. But I sent it to Attic press and was invited to attend a writing workshop. Suddenly I began to feel that I too could be taken seriously as a writer.

Next I wrote a play with songs about all the general elections we were having at the time (I considered it Brechtian) and sent it to an amateur drama company, Club Players. They did a reading but never put it on. However, they asked me to try and write a play for them, for the PJ O'Connor Radio Drama competition on RTE. I had never attempted such a thing although over the years I had listened to a lot of radio plays. The result, which I thought up on a long walk through St Anne's Park, was Mr Moonlight, my first real breakthrough.

Club Players did a wonderful production (Val O'Donnell directing) and Sean Murphy, sadly prematurely deceased, was perfect as Mr Moonlight, the quack purveyor of dreams. We won the premier award.

But it never gets easy. I was asked to try a screenplay for RTE and produced a piece called Kevin's Bed before Bernard Farrell used the same title for his stage play. Noel O'Briain, head of TV drama, Tony Barry, the director, and myself leapt like mountain goats around Glendalough looking for locations. The play never got beyond that fine day, however, since the drama budget was slashed soon afterwards.

The funny thing is how one thing so often leads to another. I wrote a play based on the Irish Women's suffrage movement, entitled Tides of Liberty. It was given a rehearsed reading at an arts centre (long gone) on Bachelor's Walk. Through that I met among others the actor and singer Susie Kennedy who put me in touch with people writing comedy sketches. I tried my hand at it and produced a few good ones, like Superwoman, Simply Disgusting,  (The Joys of Sex meets Darina Allen), and the Safe Sex Code, with Sister Angela and Father Mick. These pieces and others were used in the stage show, Mother Bat and the Rave Revue. From that I got into writing sketches for television for a time: Nighthawks and The Basement as well as contributions to a stage show called The Crack Nineties, with lots of talented and underrated actors, many of whom wrote their own material.

Then there were the novels, more radio and stage plays, the non-fiction book, and pieces that never made it into print or performance. A selection of the better bits are reproduced or indicated elsewhere on this site. "Still writing?" people often ask me, as if I have any choice. The thing about writers is that they are addicted. They can't give it up, no matter the risks to physical and mental health. Never mind the rejections, I always go on to the next thing and the next and the next.

Apart from the writing, the revelation to me has been the teaching. Forced into it for financial reasons (and check out Stephen King On Writing, where he says that the one good thing about creative writing classes is that it gives employment to otherwise penurious writers), I found that I was good at it and that I enjoyed it. It's been great for my self-confidence too. From someone who for the first forty years of her life wouldn't say boo to a gosling, never mind a goose, I've become quite a mouth and only occasionally now am dumbstruck with self-doubt.

I like Dublin but I never thought I'd stay here long enough to put my first child into school and now he's a Ph.D with a child of his own. I still don't feel rooted but perhaps that's the nature of being a writer, you stay an outsider. In my book of interviews, Where the Grass is Greener, I discovered it was a problem for many immigrant women, that for the Irish no matter how long you live here you stay foreign. But I never felt at home in England, either. My mother died in 1989 but my sister still lives in Kent. I visit London regularly but don't think of ever returning there permanently. As the song goes, I'm a stranger here myself.