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Clare Shaw got her first taste for writing when she was asked to read out her story The Snail and the Caterpillar to the rest of her class of nine-year-olds. The story made the pupils laugh and the teacher cry, so Clare learnt at an early age that writing was an emotional business. Her effort at Maths also made the teacher cry and Clare then knew for certain that writing rather than accountancy would be her destiny.

Leaving school, she trained and worked as a speech and language therapist before discovering that she still preferred writing to talking. So she became a freelance writer contributing to parents magazines and writing five books offering advice to parents including Prepare Your Child for School and Help Your Child Be Confident. Clare then produced two daughters so that she could put her own advice into practice. This proved impossible so she returned to speech therapy and started to talk to people again. But the call of the word processor was loud and Clare wrote two plays – Hothouse performed in 2006 and The Glenn Miller Neurosis Programme performed in 2007. The Mother & Daughter Diaries is her first novel.

Behind every woman writer is a man bringing her cups of tea, and John boils her kettle at their home in Essex with help from their two daughters, Emma and Jessica.

More about this author:

www.clareshaw.com.

The Mother & Daughter Diaries Competition.