iUniverse Blog

Meet award winning author Julia Ibbotson

iUniverse Publishing, back in February, discovered that we have yet another award winning author on our hands- Julia Ibbotson! As well as congratulating Julia for winning the prestigious 2012 London Book Festival Biography prize for her excellent memoir, “The Old Rectory: Escape to a Country Kitchen” and posting a blog to that effect, we asked Julia if she would like to be a guest author on the blog. As you will discover Julia has been extremely busy, but now has got back to us with a fascinating series of posts that demonstrate superbly the trials and tribulations of being a creative writer and aspiring author.

iUniverse Julia Ibbotson on writing

“I feel as though I have always been a writer. I wrote my first novel at the tender age of 10 years old. It was about my passions at the time: horses, farms and childish adventure, set in quintessential English countryside with traditional countryside pursuits and the permanency of historic farmhouses as ancestral homes. The stuff of dreams for a little English girl from the city suburbs!

But the book remains unpublished, mainly because I was never encouraged to send it to a publisher. If anyone asked me what I wanted to be I always said, a writer. But everyone persuaded me that you can’t make a living from writing; it was just a silly dream; and so it became a clandestine activity but one which I pursued privately for many a long year. Secretly, I wrote novels, short stories, poetry. I did it because my soul needed to create.

London Book Festival 2012 Biography Winner

I graduated from university with a good degree in English literature – the death knell for any creative writer! Then I became a school teacher and although I was encouraging and supporting my students to write, somehow I couldn’t put pen to paper myself any more. As time went by, I became a respected university academic and researcher, and I did write then, as part of my role – but my works were confined to academic papers on my research, articles on my field, monographs, formulaic and within the conventional strictures.

But something was missing in my life. I had a lovely, wonderful family, but there was a patch of arid desert where once there had been the blossom of creativity.”