Mandy has recently moved out of the city so commuting is becoming “etched in my neural pathways” and she prefers trains to busses “because the movement and sound of trains is more rhythmic, less distracting, and there is a romance about train travel that busses just don't have, a sense of possibility.”

That’s Mandy, a thoughtful writer, always taking you one step further behind things. She will start off talking about trains, or hairdressers or a beach then you realize that actually something else is going on, that behind all our lives there is a seam of fears and desires far more powerful than any brittle confidence we present to the outside world.

Mandy’s poetry collections 'Permission to Stare' and 'Game' were published in the 1990s. Recently she had two stories published in Are You She, edited by Lesley Glaister. Her forthcoming novel, The Habit of Loneliness, is set in Leeds, Scarborough and Nigeria, where she grew up in the 1960s. Mandy is also the Writer in Residence at Leeds General Infirmary working with patients both on the wards and after they have left hospital.

Mandy's poems have appeared in many magazines such as The North, Stand, The Rialto, Sunk Island Review, Writing Women and on BBC Radio 4, she's had stories in Mslexia, Metropolitan and The Text and been listed for the Asham and Ian St James awards. In 2005 she co-wrote a book on the renaissance in Yorkshire's cities for Yorshire Forward.