Judith Wood

Hatched a long time ago in Bombay, arguably the most exotic place I have lived. I left there aged six months.My only recollection is the sweet fetor of the city borne on hot winds to the airport where, 16 years later, my sister and I were stranded for a couple of hours. Daughter of a soldier, I lived in many other places, including Malaysia, Singapore, Cyprus, and the piny wastes of Northern Germany. Our family holidays throughout Europe were in a vast, unmannerly caravan given to charging off down hill. University days in Edinburgh studying English Literature and subsequent working days in London gave me a deep affection for these cities and a deep loathing for the cold and damp, a loathing shared by my husband, Ariff, who had spent his youth in the tropics of Guyana. Which is probably why we ended up in Andorra. This small, idiosyncratic country, has been home for more than a quarter of a century. More than all the other places I have visited or lived, it flavours what I write.

What made me start writing? Reading, art and horses were my passions. Then my little sister and I were sent to a forbidding and old-fashioned Belgian convent where the reading of anything other than religious or educational texts was frowned upon. Art was something done by numbers – and there were no horses. What could a young reading addict do except put pencil to paper? I can still see myself in my black tablier, at my desk in the vast salled'étude, bent over my jotter, a lock of hair escaping from my Alice-band.

Oh what an industrious child the fierce nuns must have thought me as I scribbled violent and bloody tales of daring and of horses, all illustrated in black and white. The memory still makes me smile.

As for publishing - a short story read out on the BBC World Service, contributions to several anthologies produced by my ever-encouraging Writers' Group (including Andorra Revealed) a couple of travel articles to say nothing of several boomeranging attempts to write for Mills and Boone. And who knows what is to come?