I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Clare Flynn, a charming writing of historical fiction novels. She was born in Liverpool and now lives in England on the Sussex coast. She’s the eldest of five children, and studied at English Language and Literature at Manchester Image of Clare and her brother growing up in Liverpool University. In her own words, she “spent most of her time studying sex, drugs and rock and roll at the expense of Beowulf and Chomsky.”

Clare worked in the field of consumer marketing with large, global companies. She promoted all manner of products, from “Fairy Liquid and Flash to chocolate biscuits and tinned tuna”. Eventually, she took the plunge and became her own boss, traveling the world to help companies define their strategies and culture.

After she wrote 80,000 words of the first draft of a novel, Clare visited Australia for the second time. A thief visited her home and stole her laptop, which was bad enough. But they also took her novel and the backup copy as well. That was a huge blow, but she read that, “T E Lawrence left the manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom on a train and went on to recreate all 700 pages of it”. This gave her the motivation to write the book again, and it was finished in July 2011 and published in 2014.