What I do

Weary of labels and stereotypes, I write across genres, blending fiction with personal experience, travel writing with magic realism, fragments with poetry. When I am not writing, I grow vegetables, get lost in books and explore spaces close and far away.

In 2021, I wrote This Is Not Who We Are, a novel inspired by my childhood pen-friend Victoria, that drew parallel between the use of language to dehumanise people today and the events that led to the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. It was my contribution to conversations about what it means to be a migrant in Britain today.

I went on to write Assimilation, a novel about what it means to belong, the forces shaping how we perceive the world, and the impact others’ perception can have on who we become.

In 2025, I published Painting over the cracks, a poetry collection exploring the themes of memory, motherhood and recovery.

I have also published a number of creative and critical essays, most recently a reflection on food and memory in Hearth (Honno, 2025), and Light Expectations in Folding Rock issue 2.

My Creative Practice

As a writer, I explore questions of belonging and the ethics of representation. I am interested in the tensions between language and experience—what can be said, and what resists articulation. I am weary of fixed definitions, boundaries and categorisation and fascinated by the idea words and their meaning are constantly evolving.

Intent on cutting across genres, my first novel blended personal experience and historical fiction, the second was described as ‘thriller meets magic realism’, and after an experiment on using poetry to heal trauma, which led to a series of wonderful community-workshops, I have retreated to focus on a memoir. I am also working with the lovely people at Honno on a project for 2027.

Writing for me involves a large cup of black coffee, a lot of reading and some quiet time to hear my own thoughts, with a dog sleeping under my desk. I journal daily, and use my cycle-commute to think about what I read the night before. Given too much time to write, I’ll invariably end up in the garden instead.

Being a Village

I’ve written all my life, but I only ‘became a writer’ in 2019, thanks to the time and generosity of a handful of Welsh (and Canadian) writers and publishers who made time to offer their advice. I am keen to pay it forward where I can. I mentor two writers per year and occasionally teach creative writing classes in public libraries. I also translate poems into English for The Other Side of Hope, to increase the visibility of francophone writers seeking refuge.

I represent authors on the Society of Authors Cymru Committee and support Folding Rock Magazine in an advisory capacity.

My Personal Journey

A migrant shaped by multi-generational diaspora, I am drawn to the spaces where different worlds meet. I arrived in Wales in 2001, and spent two decades working in campaigning and education. I joined a creative writing group in Chapter Arts Centre in 2003 and wrote for a few years, but then life happened: I lost my father, gave birth to a son. Two decades later, I realised I had unfinished business with writing. I left my job, went back to university to study creative and critical writing, and learnt the difference between writing and being a writer.

I now split my time between writing and a job supporting arts organisations through charity Arts & Business Cymru.

I am guided by an ethics of social witnessing and much of what I write is concerned with connection. Writing for me is a tool to erase boundaries by offering an opportunity to the reader to experience different perspectives.

My own experience is shaped by migration, multiculturalism and motherhood:

Identité-mosaique - the positive accumulation that happens as we traverse space and time and which renders our identity fluid and borderless, untethered from the socio-political constructs of the nation-state, instead deeply steeped in creativity, imagination and what James Clifford called travel as culture. (from Sophie Buchaillard, Between Cultures: Travel Writing, Identity and the Global Novel, PhD 2023)