Hello, I’m Kellie.

I’m obsessed with stories – whether it’s writing them, editing them or living the best one I can. My story has taken me through many genres: adventure, drama, grief, nautical (yes, nautical – including storms, shipwrecks and pirates, oh my!), romance and self-help. But right now I’m living my fantasy of travelling the world as a digital nomad while continuing my career in children’s books.

Why children’s books? Because I vividly remember when getting to the end of a line felt like wading through treacle; when I had to focus so hard on deciphering each word that the sentence as a whole was lost – never mind the actual story. As a child with temporary hearing difficulties, I struggled to learn many things, but reading was the skill I coveted most. When it finally clicked for me, I raced through the children’s books without really pausing to savour them. Later, when I had my seafaring adventure aged twelve (remember the pirates?), the English-language book-swap options were generally Mills and Boon and Virginia Andrews. So I read those. Yikes.

It wasn’t until I did a module in Writing for Young People as a creative writing undergraduate that I looked back and fell in love with children’s books. Since then I’ve specialised in children’s fiction and non-fiction at home and abroad. I worked at book shops in the UK and Australia for six years, I taught EFL in Japan for three years and progressed to an in-house commissioning editor over seven years at a small independent children’s publisher. My favourite authors (besides the many I’ve worked with) include Struan Murray, Elle McNicoll, Maz Evans and L.M. Montgomery.

Qualifications

MSc Publishing – Edinburgh Napier University
MA Writing for Young People – Bath Spa University
BA Creative Studies in English – Bath Spa University