About

Avril Joy is an award winning novelist, short story writer and poet.

She was born and brought up on the Somerset Levels, the setting for her first novel, The Sweet Track, published in 2007 by Flambard Press.

At eighteen she left home to undertake a degree in the History of Art, at U.E.A.

Moving from Norwich to London  she taught in Greenwich and Deptford and studied at Goldsmith’s College before moving north.

From the North she travelled widely in India, Kashmir and Nepal and on her return began working as a temporary teacher in  HMP Low Newton, a women’s prison, on the outskirts of Durham city.  Here, she met Writer-in-Residence Wendy Robertson and began writing. Until then she had no thoughts of being a writer.

In 2003 she won a Northern Promise Award, from New Writing North.

in 2007 when her children were up and leaving home, she finally left the prison in order to write. She was by this time a Prison Governor with responsibility for learning and skills development. Avril says, ‘I hadn’t meant to stay at Low Newton for so long but almost from the start I became deeply involved with the women and their lives – and in many ways that never leaves me. I see it creep in again and again into my writing…’

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