About Me
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write stories. Before I could write, I drew the ponies, princesses and castles that were the stuff of stories. As an only child, I was never happier than when I had a drawing book or a story for company. Books, pencils, scissors, were constant companions. Some things don’t change.
I was born near Swansea and moved to Shropshire, my father's home county, when I was five, and here I stayed until University. I studied English, French and German in London, then worked as a secretary in South Kensington, writing in my spare time, as well as making patchwork quilts, sewing and crocheting.
Soon after my son was born, we moved back to Shropshire where my husband worked as a land surveyor. A year later, my daughter was born, and I began writing children’s stories whenever I had time. Some were broadcast by the BBC. Having discovered there was no children's book on Shropshire folk stories, I decided to write one. Witches & Warriors, Legends from the Shropshire Marches was published a few years later by Shropshire Books, teamed with Robin Lawrie's wonderful illustrations.
Shropshire's landscape and folklore provided inspiration for historical romances, and my stories from that time have a distinct flavour of Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb, who remain two of my favourite writers.
When my husband set up his own land surveying practice, I went back to work and spent ten happy years with Shropshire Libraries. Having abandoned my attempts at writing historic romance, I began to write Death in the Physic Garden , my first crime novel, featuring garden designer and astrologer, Fern Green. I left my library job to study garden design which inspired me to redesign our garden, and to completely rewrite Physic Garden again…
Ten years after its conception, Death in the Physic Garden was finally finished. Publishers' readers loved the Shropshire setting and the horticulture, although one commented that the heroine "was obviously Charlie Dimmock". In fact, redheaded heroine Fern Green had arrived in 1996, two years before Ms Dimmock graced our TV screens. But though my agent and the publisher loved the story, it was a difficult time for fiction… So in Autumn 2005 I self published.
It took me ten years to complete my first novel. Taureans don't do things in a hurry. The sequel, Death in the Winter Garden was published in the Autumn of 2010. It had taken a mere seven years to write.
In April 2007, I came across the Craft Robo eletronic cutter. It was love at first sight. I began to create hand-made cards again, and design die-cuts. It was a short step from there to scrapbooking. With a new Silhouette Cameo machine to play with, I love creating titles and images for my pages as I try to establish some kind of order on years of family photographs and family history. And the need to create covers for the scrapbooks has led me back into textiles and patchwork. Writing and crafts do seem to inspire one another, sparking new ideas. For me, it is a happy combination. With my renewed interest in patchwork, quilting and textile art, I launched a new series in 2012, The Quilt Detective, with the first novel, A Patchwork of Poison , introducing textile artist Bronwen Jones. The second book in the series, Motif for Murder was published in Spring 2014. Both books are on sale as ebooks and paperbacks from Amazon. I am still working on the third in the series, although progress is slow. Since the pandemic hit us, I have also been painting, mostly in oils, rejoining the Norfolk School of Painting where Martin Kinnear steers us through the study of painters and their work every week. I also completed a City & Guilds level 3 course on patchwork and quilting which has led me to make, and plan, several new quilts, and has opened up a whole new range of creative ideas involving textiles.
Karen Lowe
January 2021
Somerset Maugham said there were three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
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