Conville & Walsh

Megan grew up in Essex in a house full of rabbits on the edge of Epping Forest, and has wanted to be a writer ever since she read Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. She graduated from Oxford with a first class degree in English literature, then sold her soul to the devil, and worked in advertising for ten years, where she won a lot of awards for things like using Twiggy to relaunch Marks & Spencer and pretending that penguins could fly for BBC iPlayer. But the thing she’s really proud of from her advertising career is working with young people involved in gang violence to create the Home Office’s anti-knife campaign. You can see the result on the It Doesn’t Have to Happen website.

Even while working long nights in advertising Megan never let go of her dream of becoming a writer. Encouraged by Carol Ann Duffy on an Arvon children’s fiction course, she started getting up at 6am every morning to write before work, and signed up to the City University’s weekly poetry workshops, (where she wrote a poem that came runner up in the Myslexia poetry competion and met the man who was to become her husband). Then on her thirtieth birthday she decided that if she really wanted to be a struggling writer, she should quit her job. So she did, and ran away to live with her husband, and the two cats they fished out of a dustbin, on top of a mountain in Greece.

This summer, they are all coming back to live on a farm in Yorkshire, where they plan to learn to ballroom dance, and grow their own vegetables, and hopefully sell a pile of books, and go on lots of school visits, and perhaps even set up a parents and children’s writing course of their own.