I wanted to be an author from the moment I could pick up a pen and was writing boarding-school novels behind the sofa by the age of nine. Sadly the need to get an education and earn some money intervened for a few years but finally in 2015 I published my first novel - a historical one under the pseudonym Joanna Courtney. I will continue to publish under that name but am delighted, as Anna Stuart, to now also be able to write contemporary fiction.