Elle M Keating enjoys painting pictures with words, often digging deep into genealogy and her Welsh heritage for inspiration.

Happily throwing her unaware characters in to situations which often brings a tense, 'It's behind you!' quality to the reader experience, Elle's writing has been described as 'leading you up a lovely garden path, then slamming you straight into a wall when you least expect it.'

Elle has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chichester. She is also a trained yoga teacher and wellness coach.

When she's not working, she can be found walking her dogs with her husband. Far from her West London roots, she now enjoys country life, living off the beaten track in a tiny hamlet that no one’s ever heard of.

'So many writers inspire me. I have very eclectic tastes and discover new ones all the time. I adore Hilary Mantel's succinct prose and the way she drives straight to the heart of a character with just a few well-chosen words. Her Wolf Hall trilogy is sheer magic. I could weep with frustration that I don’t write like her.

Writing has been in my blood forever. My mother and grandmother both wrote, my uncle was a journalist and newspaper editor, my cousin writes, my aunt was a poet, my daughter is a songwriter. I grew up with it; the need to commit deep emotions into words. It's the Welsh in me.

I've been a copywriter, a PR consultant and the editor of a property newspaper. I've also written as a columnist for a local paper but always loved to write short stories and have written poetry since I was a child. I love to write because I 'see' everything I'm writing visually, almost cinematically, so Itry to capture that with words.

Poison Summer is not the first time I've attempted a novel but it’s the first time I've stuck with it...unless you count the book I tried to write - and illustrate - when I was 10 years old: an historical novel about Anne Boleyn. I was a bloodthirsty child and wanted to write about executions. I can still remember the first line: 'Anne was pregnant again.' Hilary Mantel would have been so proud.