All about Anj Cairns

Thanks so much for dropping by. Here’s just a little bit about me.    

At primary school I entered a short story competition run by the BBC. My epic adventure was about kids stranded in a school when the floods came. It won me a certificate and my first writing accolade and I was officially hooked on putting pen to paper.

At the age of 13, a friend and I started to write Beverley Hills Mansion (BHM), a novel inspired by US soap opera Dallas & Dynasty with characters loosely based on us, our friends and a boy I fancied. Sadly, BHM is all but lost in history except for a few handwritten pages I keep in my memories book. And the boy? He’s all but a faint memory.

Now it’s a different century, we have the Internet, smartphones and Netflix and many of the things which were science fiction when I was a child and I love it. Over the years, I’ve continued to write squirrelling away stories in files and folders in cupboards and computers. Now it’s time to let them loose on the world.

Books and the stories they contain have always had an important place in my heart – they are my friends, my refugee from a bad day, a doorway into other worlds. My favourites included: The Handmaids Tale, Good Fairies of New York, Rivers of London, 1984, Good Omens, The Outsiders, Girlfriend in a Coma, Northern Lights, The Book Thief, The Circle, Shades of Grey, I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew.