Natalie Allan

About Me

My lower-class upbringing came with the full package: we lived on a council estate, my mother dressed me in tracksuits, and my father ran a pub. My two much-older sisters were in high school by the time I was born. We had two ratty little dogs that would spend the night yapping away, and my family’s low income meant we required benefits to sustain our mediocre finances. Thus, life in Dudley was one of local standards.

At school, I shone in the arts and English department, impressing the teachers with my rudimentary sketches and imaginative stories. I was moved to the top classes in the imaginative, and the bottom in the practical. At home, I would spend every waking hour with various writing implements in my hands, creating vivid worlds and characters with words and paints. My parents divorced when I was thirteen and my mother passed away when I was sixteen. These occurances coupled with other teenagerly woes, led to me pouring out my feelings into short stories and poetry. I believe it was these difficult times that taught me the value of literature. Without them, I doubt I'd have ever started writing with the passion I have today.

I spent my seventeeth year living in a tiny village in Essex. I commuted daily to Chelmsford where I studied a part-time English Literature course, involving a lot of drooling over classics and writing lengthy theses. When I wasn’t at college, I was writing short stories and poems as if they were going out of fashion. When college came to a close in 2003, I decided to move on again. My sister and her family were renting a cottage near the sea front in Aberystwyth, and I was bored of the sprawling meadows and constant hay fever the rape fields bought on. Boarding various methods of transport, I travelled across the country to Wales with my two lowly rucksacks. One contained clothes and various other useful bits, the other was full of notepads which contained my life’s written work.

Adjusting to the sleepy Welsh town wasn't easy. Any literary events of any importance turned out to be at least twenty miles away, and my finances never stretched far enough to allow much sightseeing. Unable to afford another stint at college, I took my first job pushing greeting cards in a tiny shop where I spent more time dreaming up fantasy stories that I did actually working. I spent my time at home working on competition submissions and studying a home-learning fiction course from the Writer’s Bureau.

After another year of feeling unsettled, my feet began to itch again and it was time to move on. I came back to the West Midlands, to the city of Wolverhampton, where a faster pace of life was a culture shock. I soon learnt I wasn’t very good at employment. I changed jobs often due to lack of excitement, working various supermarket checkouts and filing bits of paper at a Solicitor’s firm. In 2004, I submitted a poem to a competition which was published in a book called The Heart’s Content. I didn’t win a prize, but seeing my name in print was worth more than the trophy or dough.

I’d been in Wolverhampton just a few months when I met my steady on the internet. He hailed from Yorkshirian Bradford, and we fell in love after one or two emails. A year later, against his parents’ better judgment, he left home so we could begin life as a couple in our lowly bedsit. We moved around often, taking homes on three month leases because I could never settle in one place. Our homes ranged from various areas of Wolverhampton, to one of the roughest housing estates in Bradford. The only constant in my life was writing and submitting my work to competitions.

In 2007, we finally settled in the town of Willenhall near Wolverhampton, where we married and vowed never to move house again. My husband began his career as geek at an Internet Service Provider and, after we married, he told me to give up on my terrible track record in the employment sector.

Retired at twenty-one, I focused all my energy into writing full-time, and I’ve since evolved into writing full-length novels. I didn’t give up on the writing courses, honing my skills until I finally felt confident enough to write for the publishing industry. To date, I have written six novels, each a step closer to perfecting my craft than the last.

I’m a terrible housewife and prefer to spend my time writing than vaccuming, but what can I say? I was born to write and literature is my life.