Janice B. Scott

I was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, UK, but was raised in Croydon, South London, as my father worked for Her Majesty's Stationery Office in London. I won a scholarship to Croydon High School, and went on to train as a physiotherapist and later as a teacher of physiotherapy.

I started writing in the seventies, winning a radio short story competition and having a short story published in the prestigious "Writers of East Anglia" edited by Angus Wilson.

Having met and married my husband - also a teacher of physoiotherapy - we set up a private physiotherapy practice together in Fakenham, a small town in North Norfolk, and produced three children, all of whom are now grown and flown.

In the late eighties I changed career, and was ordained as a priest in the Church of England with the first batch of women priests, in 1994. At around the same time I started my own website, offering weekly sermons for adults and stories for children. This was taken over in around 2002 by sermonsuite.com, a US publishing company, for whom I write as "The Village Shepherd". They published volume one of a book of short stories for children and adults, "Children's Stories from the Village Shepherd" in 2009. Each story is based on the Sunday Bible readings but all are very accessible to non-Christians. Volumes two and three are due out this year.

I am also a staff writer for Redemptorist Publications, which produces weekly worship material and sermons, and which is marketed world-wide.

I worked as rector of six village churches in south Norfolk (UK), and was made Hon. Canon of Norwich Cathedral in 2008. The village churches supplied the background for my three novels, "Heaven Spent" (available in hardback and Kindle editions), "Babes and Sucklings" (available in paperback and shortly to be available in Kindle) and "Vengeance Lies In wait" (available in Kindle). I am now working on my fourth novel in the same series.

Each novel features the Rev. Polly Hewitt, a young female priest in the Church of England. In "Heaven Spent" and "Babes and Sucklings" she is a curate, working with difficult rectors and finding herself in all sorts of trouble. In the most recent novel, "Vengeance Lies In Wait", she has moved to new rural parishes near Norwich (a small city in Norfolk, UK) as a rector in her own right, which brings its own unexpected problems. This is a murder mystery novel in which, needless to say, Polly gets involved in the murder.

I am presently living in Norwich, Norfolk, UK with my husband Ian, continuing writing, playing golf whenever possible, and visiting the family.