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Kate Walker

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Kate Walker was born on 10 January 1950 in Nottinghamshire, England, but her family moved to West Yorkshire when she was just 18 months old, and she has always regarded Yorkshire as home. She was the middle child in a family of five girls, growing up in a home where books were vitally important, and she read anything she could get her hands on. Even before she could write she was making up stories. At the age of four she was telling the tale of The Three Little Raindrops Drippy, Droppy, and Droopy to her two younger sisters. She can't remember a time when she wasn't scribbling away at something, and wrote her first "book" when she was 11. But everyone told her that she would never make a living as a writer, and that she should work toward a more secure career. So she decided that if she couldn't write books, at least she could work with them, and settled for becoming a librarian. On leaving school she went to the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth to study English and librarianship. While there, she met her husband, who was also studying at the college. They married and moved back north, eventually settling in Lincolnshire, where she worked as a children's librarian until her son was born. After three years of being a full-time housewife and mother she was ready for a new challenge, but needed something she could do at home, so she turned to her old love of writing. Her first attempts at writing novels were done at the kitchen table, often working late into the night when her son was asleep, or during a few snatched hours while he was out at nursery school. The first two novels she sent off to Mills & Boon were rejected, but the third attempt was successful. She can still remember the moment that a letter of acceptance arrived instead of the rejection slip she had been dreading. She must have read that letter over and over a hundred times before what it said sank in, and for days she kept checking it just to make sure she hadn't been dreaming. But the