Jill says she's been writing "pretty much since I was in the cot". She took her first degree in English and then became a secondary-school teacher – "as a stopgap until I got my writing career going!" But she fell in love with teaching, and ended up becoming a leading headteacher, first in a top boarding school in Surrey and then an independent day school in London. From here, she put aside what had come to feel like ‘the easy life’ to take over a Brighton state school in special measures, and went into battle on behalf of the teenagers that society tries to discount, or pretends not to notice. She somehow also found time to raise three children and do a PhD at Hull (where she knew poet Philip Larkin). After moving to the Lake District she took up her writing in earnest, doing another PhD (phew!), this time in Creative Writing at Newcastle. Morph was her first published novel (2019), and she's published two more since – Anna & the Snake Queen (2020) and If Dreams Should Die (2022). She'll be publishing her fourth novel in 2023.