Anne Weale's great-grandfather was a well-known writer on moral theology, so perhaps she inherited her writing gene from him. She was "talking stories" to herself long before she could read.

Anne feels that today's young women seem less inclined to risk everything for love than her generation. When she was 21 the man she was wildly in love with announced that he was off to the other side of the world. He thought they should either marry or say goodbye. At the time, Anne was a newspaper reporter with a career plan. But she felt that wonderful men were much harder to find than good jobs, so she put her career on hold. What a wise decision it was!

Together they have travelled the world and raised a delightful son who is as adventurous as his father. Her husband and son have even climbed in the Andes and the Himalayas, giving her lots of ideas for stories.

Anne feels she was destined to write. But, if she hadn't spent part of her bridal year living on the edge of a jungle in Malaysia, she might never have become a romance writer. That isolated house, and the perils of the state of emergency that existed in the country at that time, gave her a background and plot ideally suited to a genre she had never read until she came across some romances in the library of a country club they sometimes visited.

When they returned to Europe, she resumed her career as a journalist, writing her first romance in her spare time. At 30, with seven books published, she "retired" to have a baby and become a full-time writer.

Today Anne has written more than 80 novels and, more important, has many years of married happiness to look back on. Not that she spends much time looking back when the future is still exciting! She always believed that true love could last a lifetime. Now she can write about it with the even stronger conviction that comes from experience.

Anne loves to hear from her fans, you can email her at: [email protected]