Born on a steam railway and brought up on the South Coast of England, such beginnings were destined to leave BK Duncan with a love of vintage transport, crashing seas, and Art Deco architecture.
The first person in her family to ever go into higher education, she studied English literature and language at Lancaster University before embarking on a career in developmental learning and organisational culture change. When the time came for a new challenge she set about teaching herself the skills to become a full-time writer. She cut her teeth on journal articles, local newspaper pieces, and a magazine series on renovating her house in the Spanish mountains.
Finally she felt ready to the longed-for journey into novel writing. Her May Keaps series is built on her fascination for how life was for the ordinary working class people of 1920’s Poplar in the East End of London, drawing on oral history of what it was like living in the shadow of the busiest docks in the world.
These days she combines writing novels with lecturing in creative writing in colleges and academies in Cambridge. Her summers are spent on two never-ending tasks – re-pointing the walls of her flint cottage and reclaiming the wilderness of her meadow garden.
For relaxation she reads, goes to the cinema and theatre, and explores the local countryside looking for evidence of past civilisations in the landscape. She has rediscovered sewing and as well as making her own clothes, designs the patterns as well. Weekends find her romping through the woods with a longbow as a member of a field archery club.
Her proudest moment was when, as a student, she overcame her fear of deep water to go potholing in the Yorkshire Pennines.
