Catherine Cookson: The Biography - Softcover

Born in 1906, the illegitimate daughter of a servant, Catherine Cookson was brought up in Tyneside in one of the poorest communities of the western world. This explores how Cookson determined to escape her situation and did so in a career which produced 97 novels, all still in print. Kathleen Jones has delved into early drafts of Cookson's own autobiography, and has also used as background hours of privately taped conversation in which Cookson discusses much that she chose to keep secret in her own lifetime: her tortured feelings for her mother, her own mental torment and terrors, and her intense and devastating relationship with Nan Smith, who almost succeeded in wrecking Catherine's marriage to Tom.

Kathleen Jones was born in 1947 and brought up in the Lake District where she now lives. She spent eleven years in Africa and the Middle East, before returning to England and writing her first biography in 1991. Other biographies followed, as well as short fiction, journalism and poetry.