About The Author

In October 2007, on this very blog, I explained why I chose the name Madeleine Conway as my pen-name. But actually, I was first published using my maiden name, Zeba Kalim, a name which I will continue to use for non-romantic fiction. However, I've been a teacher since I married, so my working name in schools has always been Zeba Clarke, and when writing things like dissertations and educational journalism, that's the name I use. So essentially, I am one person, but with three working names.

Despite the unusual maiden name, I was born in the UK, moved to the US at a very early stage, but was sent to boarding school in the UK and completed my education there. When I left university, I tried the City for about five minutes until realising that all the zeroes spooked me. I then started at the bottom of the ladder as an editorial assistant and climbed up the journalism pole in the field of energy economics (primarily natural gas, which for some reason I can never quite fathom, makes people snigger). After that, perhaps inappropriately for a card-carrying feminist, I followed a man and moved to China, but decided to get a professional qualification to make sure I'd always be able to find some kind of work. I trained as an English and Drama teacher and then went to Beijing for four and a half years. While there, I directed a lot of plays, including Hamlet on the Great Wall and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the UK Ambassador's garden, as well as travelling, teaching and producing a baby. When my family came back to the UK in the middle of the school year, I couldn't find a teaching job so went back into journalism and wrote about packaging for a magazine called Canning and Filling (fondly dubbed Caning and Flogging in the family, but it did pay for us to lay some carpet in our flat). It was an escape to return to teaching about a year later, and I have been steadily developing my whiteboard skills since in the UK and more recently, in Brussels.

Away from teaching, reading and writing, I like walking around Brussels and other parts of Belgium, playing with minions 1 and 2, and swearing at Davina McCall whose exercise DVDs are very irritating but effective.