Sarah Bower
Sarah was born and brought up in Yorkshire but now lives in Suffolk with her husband and two grown-up sons, not to mention the two golden retrievers, three chickens and an elderly, obese cat. She works for Creative Arts East, an arts development agency in Norfolk, managing projects to promote reading and creative writing. She also teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she completed a creative writing MA in 2002. She has published fiction and non-fiction in journals as various as MsLexia and British Industry. She was short-listed for the Curtis Brown scholarship at UEA in 2001/02 and has had success in a number of short story competitions, most recently as winner of the Café Writers Short Fiction Competition 2005.
Sarah has a weakness for lost causes and spends much of her leisure time watching England play cricket. Apart from being successful as a novelist, her biggest ambition is to spend a year travelling the world with the Barmy Army.
“One night when the moon was full, I explained to you about how the moon controls the tides, and you said I was like the moon and you were the sea, always following me about. And I said nothing, because I knew it was truly the other way around.”
“When we say we have given up hope, all we are really doing is challenging Madame Fortune to prove us wrong.”
“Agatha surveys the garden, its rows of crinkled spring cabbages and beanstalks entwining bowers of hawthorn and hazel. The rosemary is dotted with pale blue stars of blossom and chives nod heads of tousled purple. New sage leaves sprout silver green among the brittle, frost-browned remains of last year's growth. Lily of the valley, she thinks, that will be out in the cloister garden at Saint Justina's by now.”
“What a blessing it is we cannot see our futures.”
“Sometimes I dance, alone, to music no-one can hear but me. When I dance I feel the beat of the earth’s own heart rise through my feet and legs, through my loins and belly and into my chest, until my own heart beats in time with the earth’s. Then I wonder if you feel it too, beneath that portion of the earth’s crust where you stand, or walk, or lie, or dance too. Because always, when I’m dancing, I’m dancing with you.”