Julia Gregson
My father was in the Air Force, so after thirteen schools I left early longing to travel and have adventures. I worked as a jillaroo in the Australian outback, a girl groom, a shearer’s cook, a secretary, a hospital cleaner, and later, back in England, as a house model for Hardy Amies in London.
In the seventies, and back in Australia again, love of horses led to riding out with Mick Jagger on the set of Ned Kelly and my first published article in The Sydney Morning Herald. Gave up paid employment, poverty and panic followed, but eventually got more work as a journalist. Secretly wrote short stories that were never published. I eventually started to write regularly for Australian magazines. In the seventies, I was sent to Vietnam and India to write stories, and later to New York as a foreign correspondent for a group of Australian magazines (Sungravure) where I also worked for Rolling Stone Magazine.
During this time, spent four days with Muhammad Ali in a boxer’s training camp in Pennsylvania, interviewed Buzz Aldrin in Houston; Ronnie Biggs in a Brazilian jail at midnight; president’s wives, film stars in Hollywood and several notorious criminals. All good grist to my story-writing mill.
I enjoy writing short stories and have published in places like The Literary Review, The Times, Good Housekeeping, and read on the B.B.C.
Orion published my first novel, THE WATER HORSE, in 2005. I rode a horse across Wales to do the research- a wonderful experience- and then went to Istanbul and Scutari where the rest of the novel is set.
Writing EAST OF THE SUN involved two research trips to India, A great highlight. For MONSOON SUMMER, I went to Kerala, and lived with an Indian family, and travelled in a rice boat up many of the back waters I describe.
I’m married, have one daughter and four stepchildren and live in Monmouthshire with two rescue ponies, two chickens and a collie.
“what she had come to understand... was that mourning was no crime. it wasn't her feeling all boo-hoo sorry for herself, or being disgustingly self - engrossed, it was what you had to do to go on.”
“If you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth too, shell and egg. And that these people held the essence of you inside them. The rest would be conversations that ended when night fell, or the dinner part ended.”
“She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like when you're swimming and you want to put your feet down on something solid, but the water's deeper than you think and there's nothing there”
“when we look up, it widens our horizons. we see what a little speck we are in the universe, so insignificant, and we all take ourselves so seriously, but in the sky, there are no boundaries. No differences of caste or religion or race.”
“All the lies, all the ways we have of trying to make life simple for ourselves by putting people into boxes marked black, white, good, bad, when all of us are victims of our own prejudices.”
“One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.”
“From the top of the bus she could see the vast bowl of London spreading out to the horizon: splendid shops with mannequins in the window, interesting people and already a much bigger world.”