Chair of the SWWJ during its Centenary year 1994, Mary is still active on the Council, responsible for the Society's assisted-publishing initiative, SCRIPTORA.

A former teacher, she was a prolific free-lance magazine journalist in the 1980s and 90s, specialising in interviews with world-renowned writers, artists, actors and musicians. She is particularly thrilled to have interviewed Maya Angelou, Thomas Keneally and Cleo Laine.

Her feature on the Eden Project, A Vision of Eden, won her the SWWJ's coveted Violet Astor Rose bowl in 2002.

Also a dramatist, her work has been seen at the Edinburgh Festival and on the London Fringe. She has written radio plays and scripts for television, and plays, all of them published, for schools. Her first novel, Letters from Malta, came out in 1990; re-published in 2013 as an eBook, it reached an international readership. Although now in her eighties Mary is currently finishing her third novel and has a fourth at the draft stage; this one is set in the 1940s in Jamaica, where she was brought up.

'Writers never retire,' she says. 'There is always something to write about.'