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Biography:
Anne Brooke grew up on an apple farm in the heart of rural Essex, although the family moved to Colchester when she was 11. After leaving University in 1985 with a BA Honours degree in English, she spent six months doing voluntary work for St Edmund’s Church, Tendring, where her mother was living, and then moved to London, and later Chatham, to begin working in a series of administrative jobs in insurance, education and legal conferencing.
In 1992, she gave up work, mainly in desperation, and went back to University to study for her MA in Medieval English and Latin. As she was the only one on the course for that year, the tuition was incredibly focused. Her final dissertation concerned the love poetry written by James I of Scotland and Charles, duc d’Orleans (although not addressed to each other), both of whom were separately held hostage by a foreign power for many years, thus earning the departmental shorthand title of 'Anne’s sex and bondage thesis.'
She married Keith Olding, a Chartered Accountant, talented photographer and undoubtedly the kindest man in the world, in 1993 and moved to Surrey, where she has lived for the last ten years, seven of which have been spent working as a PA/Administrator for an IT consultancy. Her interests include playing bad golf, theatre-going, reading books with at least one dead body in them, and of course writing, which - sometimes! - keeps her sane. For her sins, she is the Sacristan and a PCC member of St Peter’s Church, Hascombe.
