Clare Flynn lives in England on the Sussex coast, where she can see the sea from her windows. She lived there during her teenage years and returned to be close to the sea and the South Downs after twenty years in London.

Born in Liverpool, the eldest of five children, she read English Language and Literature at Manchester University. where she spent most of her time studying sex, drugs and rock and roll in preference to Beowulf and Chomsky.

Clare’s business career was in consumer marketing, with big global companies, promoting products from Fairy Liquid and Flash to chocolate biscuits and tinned tuna. This included stints in Paris, Brussels, Sydney and Milan. She then became her own boss and travelled the world helping companies with their strategies and their corporate culture.

A Greater World was begun in 1998 after Clare’s second visit to Australia. Having written eighty thousand words of the first draft, her home was burgled, and the thieves ran off with the laptop she’d written it on as well as the backup. Needless to say that was a bit of a blow. Reading that T E Lawrence left the manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom on a train and went on to recreate all 700 pages of it, gave Clare the impetus to sit down and start all over again. It was finished in July 2011 and finally published in 2014.

When she’s not busy writing, Clare loves to travel – often as part of the research for her books. Kurinji Flowers started out with a sleepless night in a hotel room in India while on holiday. She returned to Kerala and spent two weeks living on a tea plantation   while she finished the book off. She always travels with sketchbook and paints and loves nothing more than spending a week in a beautiful location painting. She also loves to quilt.

Clare has taken inspiration from her surroundings in Eastbourne to write her fifth novel, The Chalky Sea. It is set in World War II – the town’s history during the war is a little known secret.