Sue is a freelance writer and the author of eight non-fiction works published under ten titles. Seven have been commercially published. One, Royal Colonnade: A Terrace  in Changing Times, was a private commission and not for sale, so it doesn’t appear in Books but you can read about it here.

After a brief period teaching, much of her career was spent in commercial broadcasting, principally in policy and regulation. It was here that she started to learn how to write.

She then combined freelance writing assignments – speeches, policy papers, editing bid documents, Press articles and ghosting a regular column for a national daily – with her own writing, often in collaboration with Steve Humphries of Testimony Films.

As a founder Associate of Pagefield communications consultancy, Sue accepted some fascinating assignments, including working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Thames River Pageant in 2012.

How she got to here

Sue was born in Peckham, south London, in the early 1950s to an unmarried GPO telephonist. She knows little about her birth father. The story of her adoption and subsequent search for her birth family is told in Love Child, her first book.

After secondary modern and comprehensive schools and teacher-training at Trent Park College of Education, she emerged with a BEd in Drama and Philosophy of Education. Her first and only teaching job was at Bishop Douglass school in north London where she taught English and Drama.

As a result of one of those serendipidous events that change careers, she moved from teaching to a lowly secretarial job in the Educational Programmes section of the commercial TV regulatory body, the Independent Broadcasting Authority and left, 20 years later, as Senior Programme Officer regulating the factual output of ITV and Channel 4.

In the 1990s she was head-hunted to work with the MD of London Weekend Television. Here she realised for the first time that writing was a skill that not everyone has – and hers was in demand. After three years there as a policy advisor and then Head of Public Affairs, she went freelance and worked at ITV Network advising its Director of Programmes.

A chance meeting with documentary film-maker and oral historian Steve Humphries in 2003 led to a friendship and life-changing collaboration over more than two decades. This has resulted in five non-fiction books published since 2005, written in association with Steve’s documentary series for BBC, ITV and Channel 4.