Born in London, 1948, only child of the poet Thomas Blackburn and the painter Rosalie de Meric.
Lives in Suffolk and sometimes in northern Italy. Two children, one stepdaughter and four grandchildren.
Was married to the Dutch sculptor Herman Makkink (1937-2013) in 1999.
www.hermanmakkink.com

The Nature of my Writing
In the late 1950s, the jazz singer Billie Holiday was asked in a radio interview what the blues meant to her. "There are two kinds of blues" she says, her voice as crackly as a scratched record, "happy blues and sad blues, I don’t ever sing the same song twice and I don’t ever sing the same tempo; one night it’s a little bit slower, next night it’s a little bit faster, depending how I feel. Everything I do sing, it's part of my life!"

Everything I have written has been part of my life in one way or another and I sometimes wonder how much faster or slower, happier or sadder, each book would have been, if I had written it at a different time, according to a different mood or circumstance.

When I started writing I tried to make fiction, but its wide and un-signposted landscape made me nervous and I quickly lost my way. So I stepped into research and the more solid structures it seems to offer. I am not and never have been an historian or a specialist in any particular field, but I am fascinated by the way that one can get closer to an understanding of a long-dead stranger or a distant time by entering what Henry James called the visitable past: the places that still hold echoes of what once was.