Pamela Cleaver

About Me


I live in a small country village in Norfolk with my husband and two Springer spaniels, Silky and Zephyr. I don't like housework, and I'm not one for the great outdoors, although as a child I was mad keen on ponies, and living on Exmoor, did a great deal of riding.

Being an indoor person, my main interests are reading, writing, embroidery and cooking. You can read some of my recipes here.

As an only child, books were my constant companions. I was read to by my father, my mother and my nanny, but as soon as I could, I learned to read.

And once I could write, writing was my joy. Notebooks have always been a temptation and a delight to me. I cannot pass a stationery counter without looking at them, running my hands lovingly over them and buying them. I especially like notebooks that have pretty covers, but a clean white page cries out to me to be written upon.

In childhood, if I didn't have a notebook handy, I made my own. I would beg writing paper from my mother, fold it into book shape, sew a seam with huge ugly stitches and presto, I had a book.

I mostly played on my own, acting out stories I had read or my own invented dramas. Playing all the parts and making up the dialogue were the roots of plotting and characterisation before I knew what that meant.

Later, at boarding school, I read more than I studied and wrote more than I did school work. I had a highly derivative saga going involving a beautiful maiden, sinister gypsies, highwaymen, dashing heroes. You name a cliché and it was there. However, I enjoyed writing it and read instalments to friends in the dormitory at night. In my last year at school, I won an international essay competition.

I always wanted to be a writer. All the jobs I took were chosen to lead towards that goal. I worked in a literary agency, on magazines, in advertising and as secretary/assistant to writers and journalists. When I was first married, I stayed at home and tried to write short stories, articles and books but I realised I had not lived enough to write anything meaningful so I took my secretarial skills to an agency and worked in as many different businesses as possible, met as many different people as possible, and read as many books as I could to give me a writer's background.

Then along came my first two children and life was too busy to write. It wasn't until they started school that I had time for it. I wrote two historical novels that were quite deservedly not published, but I leant a lot writing them.

Two more children later, I started to get short stories and articles published. As I was knee-deep in children, I usually wrote for children or about children's books and children's writers.

Then my agent introduced me to a publisher who was starting a new paperback imprint for children and for her I wrote THE SPARROW BOOK OF RECORD BREAKERS and THE SPARROW BOOK OF ANIMAL RECORDS.

I began teaching Writing for Children at the London School of Journalism which I still do today and I also teach the same subject for Writers' News Home Study Division. This summer (2005), I have been teaching Writing Children's Fiction at the University of East Anglia's School of Continuing Education.

Nowadays I write both for children and adults. I like to write romances and am a member of the Romantic Novelists Association. See "My Books" page for my Regency Romance set in Suffolk.

I have been happily married to the same man for over fifty years which I think is pretty romantic. For our Golden Wedding, our children and grandchildren gave us the most wonderful surprise party that had me crying tears of joy.

That was romantic too!

Pamela's Wedding Picture


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