Born in rural Lincolnshire in 1959, Anne moved to South Yorkshire at the age of two. Following her education at Sheffield High School for Girls, she went into the IT industry, a career which took her to both New York’s Wall Street and Denver, Colorado. In America she began to take seriously her ambition to write fiction, and bought a typewriter for her first short stories.

On returning to the UK, she booked a summer holiday with her sister. The location they chose was a tiny island in southern Greece. “We arrived at night; there was nothing to see,” she recalls. “But the next morning, I opened the shutters of our rented house, and bam! Love at first sight. The brilliant blue sea, the scent of herbs on the breeze, the timelessness of the place… It was the first moment of a love affair which has lasted twenty years.”

Anne spent a number of years living in the islands; she married a Greek, and her son was born there. Returning again to the UK, she was still writing, but the short stories had grown into novels.“I wrote three, and whilst I was getting interest in my writing, those novels didn’t find publishers, though a northern-based thriller came close,” she says. “Then I decided to write a novel set in Greece, based on a character who’d come to my mind whilst I was living there. He became Hermes Diaktoros. I sent the manuscript to an agent, and went off to spend some time in Greece. When I returned, I got the call I’d been waiting for. I’d written the right book at last.”