Before I wrote novels, I spent years listening to people.
My photography and storytelling projects explore experiences including dementia, addiction, homelessness, domestic abuse, baby loss and volunteering. They are built through conversations with individuals, families, charities and communities—often with people whose lives are more complicated than the labels used to describe them.
The projects are separate from my fiction, but they come from the same place: a belief that everybody deserves to be seen as a whole person.
That belief sits beneath every book I write.
Each project begins with a conversation.
Not an interview designed to extract the perfect quotation. Not a list of questions with little boxes waiting to be filled. A proper conversation, with enough time for people to settle, wander off course and decide what they genuinely want to say.
The photographs develop quietly alongside those conversations. Nothing is hurried or staged. People understand how their words and images will be used, and they have the opportunity to see their story before it is shared.
This way of working has taught me that the important part of a person’s story is rarely found in the first answer. It appears in the pauses, the small details and the things remembered just as everybody thinks the conversation is ending.
Novelists tend to call that character development.
I call it putting the kettle on again.
My novels are fictional. The people in them are invented, and their stories belong to them.
The emotional foundations, however, are real.
Years of project work have shaped the way I write about difficult subjects. They have taught me to look beyond a diagnosis, a crisis or a headline and notice the person who remains: their humour, habits, contradictions, frustrations and capacity to surprise everyone—including themselves.
That is why illness is never the whole identity of a character in my books. Addiction is not a convenient plot twist. Homelessness is not shorthand for failure. Volunteering is not simply an act of sainthood performed by people with suspiciously tidy kitchens.
Real lives are messier, funnier and far more interesting than that.
The project work helps me approach those lives with care, curiosity and respect.
These projects represent the main bodies of work, alongside a number of smaller commissions, collaborations and community-based storytelling projects. Each has its own subject and setting, but all are rooted in the same approach: listening carefully, making space for lived experience and sharing stories with dignity.
A photography and storytelling project exploring life with dementia.
Rather than presenting dementia only through loss, Moments That Remain looks at the connection, humour, routine and affection that continue to exist. It recognises the difficulties without allowing the diagnosis to erase the individual.
Those same ideas sit at the heart of The Forget Me Not Chronicles: that memory may change, but personhood, love and the need to belong remain.
A project challenging common assumptions about homelessness by placing lived experience ahead of labels.
The people who participated were not presented as statistics, warnings or problems to be solved. They were given room to describe their own lives in all their complexity.
This work is especially personal to me. Having experienced homelessness and addiction myself, I understand how quickly somebody can be reduced to the worst period of their life—and how much difference it makes when another person looks beyond it.
Its influence can be felt throughout my writing about recovery, dignity and second chances.
Echoes creates a careful, respectful space in which people can describe the lasting effects of domestic abuse in their own words.
The project avoids spectacle and easy conclusions. Its focus is the reality that continues after the moment outsiders assume the story has finished.
It reinforced something essential to my writing: difficult experiences should never be used simply to manufacture drama. They must be approached with patience, honesty and respect for the person at the centre.
A celebration of the people who give their time to keep communities moving.
The project explores why people volunteer, what the experience gives back and how ordinary acts of generosity can create extraordinary change. It also reveals something my fictional characters understand rather well: the people holding everything together are not always the ones with official titles.
Community, belonging and the peculiar things that happen when well-intentioned people form a committee run throughout my books.
Created in conjunction with Remember My Baby, Still Here uses photography and storytelling to honour babies who are loved and remembered.
Baby loss is frequently surrounded by silence because people are frightened of saying the wrong thing. This project offers families room to speak without pressure or expectation, ensuring that lives and memories are acknowledged with tenderness and dignity.
It is quiet work, but quiet does not mean unimportant.
Alongside these larger bodies of work, I have also created and contributed to smaller projects, commissions and collaborations exploring community, identity, recovery, remembrance and belonging.
These have included local storytelling initiatives, charity partnerships, community exhibitions, individual portrait and interview projects, and work created in response to specific events or campaigns. Some have been short-term projects; others have developed through a single conversation, a small group of participants or a particular community need.
Although they may be smaller in scale, they are not lesser in importance. Often, these projects offer the most direct opportunity to listen to people whose experiences might otherwise remain unseen.
These projects have been exhibited in public, cultural and professional spaces including St Albans Cathedral, The Photography Show at ExCeL London, The Societies of Photographers Convention, local-authority venues and community spaces across Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire.
Together, they have been seen by more than 100,000 people.
The work has also been shared with charities, councils, MPs, funders and decision-makers, helping real voices enter conversations that too often take place without them.
The projects have received significant recognition, including the Special Contribution Award from The Guild of Photographers, celebrating the impact and importance of the work, and both High Sheriff Awards: the High Sheriff of Hertfordshire Award and the High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire Award, recognising work that supports communities, amplifies lived experience and creates meaningful social change.
The work has also received a commendation from Her Majesty the Queen, who described it as:
“Incredibly powerful and deeply moving and will, no doubt, touch, change and even save lives across our country.”
The projects have been the subject of numerous press articles and broadcasts, including coverage and discussion on BBC Three Counties Radio, alongside wider local, regional and specialist media attention.
These awards, commendations and features are deeply valued because they reflect the reach and potential impact of the work. But they are not the reason for doing it.
The most important moment still happens much earlier—when somebody realises they have been heard without judgement and represented in a way that feels true.
My books and project work take different forms, but they are connected by the same questions.
What happens when we look beyond the label?
How do people keep going when life refuses to cooperate?
What can humour carry when reassurance is not enough?
And how much difference can one person make simply by listening properly?
The projects do not provide simple answers. Neither do the novels. Life has never been especially cooperative in that respect.
Instead, both create space for complicated people, difficult experiences, unexpected friendships and the stubborn possibility of hope.
I am available for author events, interviews and conversations about the relationship between lived experience, documentary storytelling and fiction.
If you are planning an event, representing a reading group or exploring a possible collaboration, please get in touch. You do not need a perfectly formed proposal—an honest starting point and a cup of tea will usually do.