I grew up on a farm in West Sussex, in the kind of quiet that either teaches you to listen or teaches you to talk to fill it. I chose listening. It's served me better as a novelist than it ever did at family dinners.

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I trained as a journalist at the London School of Journalism and read for a first-class degree at the University of Greenwich, which meant years of learning to notice what people leave out of a sentence — the pause before an answer, the detail someone repeats because they can't say the real thing. That habit followed me into fiction. Primogeniture is built on it: a family that has spent three generations agreeing not to ask the obvious question.

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I'm bilingual in English and French, and I work as a Certified Neurodiversity Coach, which is its own kind of translation — helping people and the families around them understand a language that isn't always spoken plainly. That work became Neurodiversity Decoded: The Complete Handbook to Raising Neurodiverse Children, published in February 2026, under my married name Caitlin Verdier.

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Primogeniture is my first novel. It's set in the county I grew up in, among people who inherit land, expectation, and silence in roughly equal measure. These days I split my time between Rye, New York and West Sussex — close enough to the fields I write about that I can't pretend I've left them behind.