Patricia Tyrrell

Patricia Tyrrell was born on October 3, 1929, in Norfolk, England. She worked in the British civil service for seventeen years before resigning and moving to Washington, D.C., to work as a housekeeper/companion for an elderly woman with dementia. This led to a job as a practical nurse in a D.C. hospital. Patricia attended Montgomery College, Maryland, as a part-time student and graduated as a registered nurse in 1976. She also became a U.S. citizen.

In 1980, Patricia moved to a small cabin on eleven acres of woodland in the Virginia Hills, the area that is the setting for much of The Reckoning. While living in Virginia, Patricia worked part-time as a flea market stallholder, and in her spare time she began to write. In 1983, Patricia moved back to the U.K. Since then, she has written full-time and has been widely published in magazines. For years, Patricia sent her completed novels to publishers, but had no success: “I didn’t only get rejections,” the author has commented, “but annoying rejections.” In 2000, discouraged by the increasingly difficult market in Britain, Patricia decided to self-publish one of her novels. Into the Promised Land was the runner-up for Britain’s Sagittarius Award in 2001.

This success prompted Patricia to self-publish another novel. She printed 300 copies of The Reckoning (entitled The Bones in the Womb in the U.K.), selling them to nearby libraries. The book gained popularity by word of mouth and was eventually shortlisted for the Encore Prize, which recognizes the best second novels published in the U.K. One of the judges for the prize was so impressed with the novel she passed it on to her own literary agent, and the book was soon snapped up by a U.K. publisher and drawing attention from others around the world. Since then, The Reckoning has also been translated into Japanese and Portuguese. In addition to her novels, Patricia has published two poetry collections, Human is Not Enough and Prime Numbers. Patricia currently resides in Cornwall, and her latest novel, Grandmother Wolf, has just been released in the U.K.