For as long as she can remember, Lucy has always loved books – stories of adventure, of weird and wonderful places, and seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. She always dreamed of writing, but there were other things to do first. She studied languages and philosophy at Oxford and joined the Foreign Office straight out of university in search of adventure and new people and places. She quickly moved across to the Department for International Development (DFID), where she spent time in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, China and Sierra Leone. She left Sierra Leone to join her now husband in Jordan, taking the long way there across the Sahara, Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and Syria in a much-beloved Land Rover. In Jordan, she worked for Her Majesty Queen Rania while spending much time bumping around the phenomenal Jordanian desert. After Jordan, she spent several years in a jungle camp in Gabon surrounded by elephants and humpback whales, which is where the Sarah Black books began. They took life as a way to record all the best bits of people she had met and places she had been, with a plot to make them much more exciting. Lucy has always plausibly denied being a spy – but the books were written to show what that life might have been like. She spent three years in Brisbane, Australia, and another two experiencing deep culture-shock in the Netherlands during the weirdness of the pandemic, and is now enjoying the freedom of living at the end of the world in Lüderitz, Namibia, crafting stories and making films about the adventure of growing giant kelp. She also wastes a considerable amount of time on Twitter @HooftLucy