Born in the U.K., I immigrated to New Zealand at the age of ten. Growing up and adapting to life in a new country sparked a lifelong curiosity about how people evolve when confronted with environments and cultures very different from the ones they once knew.

An early career with Air New Zealand took me around the world before I ever thought to write about it. I spent those years watching how people carried their histories with them: the small rituals, the things left unsaid, the way a place shapes a marriage or a family without anyone quite noticing it happen. It's the same instinct that eventually pulled me toward fiction — stories with real historical weight, but told at the scale of a single household rather than an empire.

Several visits to India left me unable to look away from the period of the British Raj: its genuine achievements sitting uncomfortably alongside its cruelties, often within the same family, the same year, sometimes the same person. While researching late Victorian and Edwardian Britain and India, I found myself less interested in the official record than in what it left out: the marriages arranged for advantage, the servants and guides whose names rarely made it into anyone's ledger, the children raised between two worlds and fully at home in neither.

My father gave me the other half of the story. He was a man who could never quite sit still. Before each sabbatical, he would meticulously plan railway journeys across Europe, his battered Thomas Cook timetables spread across the dining table, tracing routes from one country into the next. Watching him, I learned that railways were never really about getting somewhere; they carried people, and they carried stories. When I came across the Kalka–Simla Railway, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, climbing nearly 1,500 metres through more than a hundred tunnels into the Himalayas — I recognised it at once as the place where his love of railways and my love of history could finally meet.

Of Iron and Incense is my debut novel: a story about family, duty, and the lives that get built in the space between the world we are given and the one we choose.

I now live in Auckland, New Zealand, where I continue to write, research, and go looking for the stories history left out.