Pauline Plummer is an Irish/Welsh mixture from Liverpool who has lived in NE England since the 1980s and raised her family there. She has won many prizes for her poems and short stories and appeared on Tyne Tees TV. One story was performed/read at Northern Stage. Pauline worked as tutor of creative writing at UNN (University of Northumbria at Newcastle), the Open University and at the University of Sierra Leone. She has also been a community worker, fruit picker, cook and worked for Amnesty International. Currently she teaches English to people seeking asylum and to refugees in Newcastle. Pauline is a Hawthornden Fellow and has an MA in Creative Writing – The Short Story from the OU.

 

‘Story ideas seem to come sailing to me. Mainly they look at people’s relationships in moments of change, threat and challenge – moments of emotional turmoil; these threats can come out of nowhere but the characters find ways to survive and move on, making the best of it. I examine their lives with compassion and detachment. The stories are peopled from diverse and multi-cultural backgrounds and different ages. The settings are local and abroad, reflecting my own travels and the style could be described as social realist. I have tried to be truthful in the telling – truthful in the sense of reflecting what I know and have known of human beings and how they live their lives. But as you know, what is realistic and what is hoped for are different things.

 

The five linked stories depict a young woman’s journey from youthful carelessness to an acceptance of who she wants to be.’

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