Anna Roberts was born and grew up on the Isle of Wight, a small island of disproportionate historical interest and alumni such as Keats, Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne. This rarefied literary atmosphere made little impression but did leave her with a deep and lasting antipathy to the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Semi-educated at Kings College London, Anna Roberts then returned to the Isle of Wight, where she now lists her hobbies as cat-wrangling, faking séances and trying to sound interesting in potted author biographies. Her fascination with the paranormal and the probably-not-that-supernatural stems from childhood, when she would sit far too close to the television whenever Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World was on.