Dr Alison Habens is course leader for Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth, teaching everything from fairy tales to philosophy, epic poetry to postmodern fiction. She runs life-writing for wellbeing workshops at the international retreat centre www.Skyros.com.

Her first novel, Dreamhouse, achieved a minor cult status when published by Picador in New York in the 1990s, but she has written every day since, with two further novels, Lifestory and Family Outing, in print and short stories, articles, poems and plays on www.alisonhabens.com. Her new novels are a feminist retelling of the St Veronica myth (www.thetruepicture.co.uk) and an alternative rom-com, Pencilwood (www.pencilwood.com).

She holds a PhD on the subject of ‘divine inspiration’ in literature, lives in an old church on the Isle of Wight, and commutes to work by hovercraft.

Alison has a poem in  Menopause: The Anthology