Biography

Penny is a scientist, a crime writer and was an academic for several decades (in Computer Science, Healthcare Informatics and Health Professional Studies), and was Chair of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society for six years from 2007 to 2013.

A writer all her life, she penned her first story at age 4 and won her first writing competition at age 9.  In 2004 under the name Ellen Grubb she received an international  award, the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger.

She has worked in a variety of jobs, having been on the inside of pathology labs, operating theatres and medical schools across Europe. She is a passionate advocate of writers’ rights and represented the International Authors Forum in Nairobi in May 2012 at a conference entitled: Enhancing the culture of reading and books in the digital age. The presentations she made to the various panels are available here, albeit somewhat dry. There was a fun side to the conference and it is recorded here in photos and videos.

Home is with her husband and a transient population of family members and animals large and small in an old farmhouse in a small East Yorkshire village.

For over a decade, Penny’s work involved four different workplaces in three different geographical locations several hundred miles apart. Even with modern technology and cloud computing, it took some serious organisation to keep the plates spinning on the sticks, so she has learnt to be pretty good at organising stuff.