Jennifer Chapman

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ABOUT JENNIFER CHAPMAN

Jennifer Chapman is an award-winning journalist and author of eight novels and three works of non-fiction.

 

Born in Enfield and brought up in Potters Bar, she trained as a journalist with Westminster Press. In a varied life she has owned a wine bar, run a PR agency, become an antiques dealer, and knitted a lot of jumpers her family won't wear. 
She has three daughters and four grandchildren and now lives in Cambridge with her husband, Richard Hay, a retired GP. 

 

Her previous novels have been sold across the world in English and in translation and have been praised by reviewers for their insightful unravelling of contemporary relationships.
 

Jennifer Chapman

Jennifer Johnson, Jennifer Westoby, Jennifer Chapman, Jennifer Hay. I'm a bit excessive when it comes to surnames and if I'd been born not in 1950 but some time later I would probably have held on to the original, rather than change with each marriage.

 

My story-telling began when I was under ten and school term ended with anyone in the class being asked to come up with something entertaining. I'd make up a story as I went along and my classmates seemed to like what they heard, so that I was the only one who ever did the end of term stories. I can't say this dawned on me much at the time and it was not until I was in my early twenties that the festering obsession to write bubbled over.

 

I wrote some short stories and they were published in national magazines. The novels didn't go so well, the first two roundly rejected; but one of them led to me being asked to write a thriller under the pseudonym Lydia Hitchcock "Britain's new mistress of suspense". The publisher, Arlington, wanted several Lydias so that half-a-dozen of her works could be produced much faster than a single Lydia would have been able to manage.

 

Lydia did not take off as planned but the publisher invited me to write whatever I liked next, and that was The Long Weekend - which they rejected.

 

I was advised to find an agent and compiled a list of six. The first one sent back The Long Weekend with a quite horrid rejection note along the lines of how could I have had the audacity …

 

'Do you think you can go on taking this sort of thing?' my then husband asked. I sent the manuscript straight off to the next agent on my list, and ten days after I had met her over a smoked salmon lunch in her Mayfair office, she sold my book for a not bad sum. This just goes to show how subjective a trade this is.

 

After publishing several more novels I was offered a go at non-fiction and wrote three books, one of them about the work of Barnardo's. Soon after publication I was at a literary event and fell into conversation with an elderly Cambridge academic who asked me about my book. After several minutes of chit chat he paused and then said: "Tell me, have you written the history of any other fruits?"

 

Which was better than being asked, as I frequently was, whether the sex scenes in my novels were from personal experience. I once responded with my own question - did they ask the authors of murder mysteries if they had ever killed anyone?

 

Nobody gets killed in any of my books, not that I can remember.