Catherine MacPhail

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Catherine MacPhail is a Scottish-born author.

Although she has had other jobs, she always wanted to be a writer but she didn't think she would be suited to it.

Her first published work was a sort of "twist-in-the-tale" story in Titbits, followed by a story in the Sunday Post.

After she had won a romantic story competition in Woman's Weekly, she decided to concentrate on romantic novels, but after writing two, she decided that it wasn't right for her. In addition to writing books for children around their teens, she also writes for adults, she is the author of the BBC Radio 2 series, My Mammy And Me.

Personal life

MacPhail was married. She had three children, one named Katie, who was the inspiration from her first book. She had two other children. MacPhail said that she would write for free, but she enjoyed being paid for it. On her website, as a child she asked "Do you know what an eejit is? Someone who is one sandwich short of a picnic … whose lift doesn't go … well, you know what I mean. Eejit is a wonderful Scottish/Irish word that seemed to sum me up perfectly when I was growing up." (Eejit is a Scottish/Irish word for someone idiotic or simple.) "I was always trying to change my image. Act sophisticated, grown up, sensible…and then a story would just plop into my mind and BANG! There I'd go, smack into another fence post."

MacPhail grew up with three sisters and a widowed mother. Although her father died when she was just two. She claimed that "her childhood was full of fun, even though it must have been so hard for my mum. Me and my sisters knew nothing of the hardship she must have had. My mother was always reading books and was never away from the library." MacPhail had stated in her own website she can always remember thinking what a wonderful place it was. You could walk out with a stack full of books and didn't even pay for them! "It was my mum who gave me my love of reading."

"Yet, my own background, my home town, have been the inspiration for most of my writing. A comedy series called My Mammy and Me, another one called We Gotta Get Outta This Place. Set in Greenock, inspired by my own experiences. And my first book, the book that changed my life, Run Zan Run, based on what happened to my own daughter Katie, in Greenock. A tip, if you want to be a writer, don't ever think nothing ever happens to you, because your own life is so interesting, if you just think about it. My only regret? I wish I had started sooner. But once I'd started? There was no stopping me."

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Career

Run, Zan, Run, MacPhail's first children's book. Katie was being bullied at school and she wanted to increase the understanding of how little assistance is really available to children who are being bullied. Run, Zan, the winner of the 1994 Kathleen Fidler Award for New Scottish Writing. Fighting Back was Catherine's next book, and it was about loan-sharking. In 1999, Fighting Back received one of the first Scottish Arts Council Children's Book Awards. The novel Fugitive was followed by this.

Nemesis, her author's collection of four books, came out in May 2008.

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