Jean Ure was born in Surrey, and knew from an early age that she was going to be a writer though also had ambitions to be a ballet dancer. She wrote what she grandly described as her first novel when she was six years old. It had absolutely no plot whatsoever, being little more than a long list of her favourite names - invitees to the birthday party of her alter ego, a girl called Carol. (Carol was her most favourite name, though she herself, for some strange reason, always wanted to be called Polyanthus). Jean spent the whole of her teenage years writing and had her first book published when she was just sixteen - an event that prompted her to leave school the following year under the impression that she was now an author. Being an author, she spent the next part of her life scrubbing floors, waiting at tables and selling groceries. She also worked as a nurse and at the BBC, and in Paris for NATO and UNESCO, staying nowhere very long. She finally enrolled at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she met her husband, translated very violent books into English for lots of money and wrote unsuccessful romantic novels for hardly any money at all. Jean is a vegan and animal lover. She lives with her husband, seven dogs and four cats in a 300-year-old house in Croydon.