Author Bio
Martina Cole was born and brought up in Aveley, Essex and still lives in the area. At the age of 48 she has success and all the rewards that entails, but her life, in common with most people’s, hasn’t been a bed of roses and she’s had to overcome many obstacles along the way.
Martina comes from a large Irish Catholic family, the youngest of five children. Her mother, a psychiatric nurse was from Dublin,and her father a merchant seaman from Cork. Martina attended a convent school which she hated and left school at fifteen with no qualifications. The one subject she liked was English, and it was her English teacher, whom she still keeps in touch with who told her she could write.
By the age of nineteen, Martina was a single mother living in a carpet-less council flat in Tilbury with her new-born son Christopher. She regularly had three jobs at a time; waitressing in pubs and clubs, often accompanied by her son. Martina had no money for a television or socializing, so, after she had put her son to bed she would write to keep herself entertained. She daydreamed about being a successful author, but didn’t have the confidence to do anything about it. My friends would say ‘working-class people like us don’t write books’.
Married in her early twenties, Martina juggled writing in her spare time with running a home and working, but it wasn’t until she was thirty that she decided to seriously devote herself to writing a full-length novel. She gave up her job as a secretary, bought an electric typewriter and decided she would ‘give it a year’. She’d started working on the manuscript of Dangerous Lady many years before and it took her eighteen months to complete—the rest is history.
Martina knows she is lucky, and despite her many work commitments makes sure she has time to devote to issues she feels strongly about. She endorses initiatives to improve conditions in today’s prisons; particularly women’s, by supporting organizations like Women in Prison, and making visits to Holloway and Bulwood Hall, and also runs occasional creative writing workshops for inmates at Wandsworth and Belmarsh prisons. Earlier this year she became an ambassador for One Parent Families, an issue she feels passionately about.
Success may have changed Martina’s life dramatically materially, but she hasn’t let it go to her head ‘I may drive a BMW now, but I haven’t changed. I’m still the old Martina. I still have all the old friends I went to school with. Losing touch with what I know would be like Jackie Collins suddenly being chucked out of all the best Hollywood parties’ she says, ‘What would there be to write about?’