Kathleen Jones is an English poet and biographer. Born and brought up on a hill farm in the north of England, she moved to London as a teenager in order to become a writer. She spent several years in Africa and the Middle East - where she worked in English broadcasting - before returning home. She read law and then English Literature as a mature student at university before specialising in early women writers - work that culminated in A Glorious Fame, the life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Her published work includes radio journalism, articles for magazines and newspapers, short fiction and eleven books - a mixture of biography, general non-fiction and two poetry collections. Her latest work, a biography of Katherine Mansfield called The Storyteller, was published in New Zealand in August 2010 by Penguin and in the UK in December 2010 by Edinburgh University Press. It includes an account of Mansfield's relationship with John Middleton Murry, his work as editor of Mansfield's unpublished manuscripts, letters and notebooks after her death, and how this adversely affected his own life. Jones has published poetry, feature articles and short fiction in a variety of national and international magazines and newspapers. Her short stories have been anthologised and broadcast on Radio 4 and on radio networks in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain. She is on the British Council authors list, and was one of the featured authors in the 'Save our Short Story Anthology' compiled by the Arts Council on the internet. A prize-winning collection of poetry, Unwritten Lives, was published by Redbeck Press in 1995 and a further collection Secret Eden was exhibited as part of a collaborative project for Visual Arts Year 97 with landscape photographer Tony Riley. Her collection Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21, published by , was joint winner of the Straid Collection Award 2011. Jones is a regular performer at Literature Festivals all over Britain and leads creative writing workshops for fiction, poetry and life writing. She is also a tutor for the Open University's new creative writing program and currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She currently lives in Cumbria and Italy with her husband the sculptor Neil Ferber.
Works
Biography
A Glorious Fame, Bloomsbury, 1988..
Learning not to be First. Windrush, 1990; OUP, 1991; Goldmann 1996..
A Passionate Sisterhood. Constable, 1997; Virago 1998..
Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999; Little Brown, 2000; Random House Australia 2000.
