Mere Literary Festival

RON BURROWS travelled widely as a RAF fighter pilot and later a chief test pilot and on leaving the service became principal of a post-graduate aerospace training school and then vice-principal of a sixth-form college. He is currently a hospital non-executive director and magistrate. He began writing fiction six years ago and has published two novels An American Exile and Fortune’s Hostage set in eighteenth century England and colonial America. Both tell the story of Jack Easton, a Portland stone mason, wrongly convicted and transported to Maryland.
Ron is now working on his third Jack Easton novel.

PETER DURKEE, for many years editor of Mere Matters, is a retired insurance underwriter who researched and used his ancestral history as the basis for his first novel From the Harp to the Eagle. He then turned to his own life with two remarkable ‘warts and all’ autobiographies; Booties to Boots and Cotton on to Chickens. Peter’s experience working in Sudan provided the background for his thriller The Black Cranes.

MELINDA EMBY’s love of gardens and poetry began as a child and these two strands combine in her children’s book Granny’s Special Garden described by the Western Morning News as ‘four seasons in one delicious book’. She spent many of her formative years abroad and on her return to England appreciated the beauty of its countryside and gardens. From her work as a primary school teacher Melinda knew the importance of picture books, but Granny’s Special Garden spent sometime on her computer until, in 2007, she published the current book which is illustrated by John Gustard.

JANE HOLMES was born in Wales but grew up in Bemerton near Salisbury. As a young girl she had a passion for the natural world and kept a diary from 1936 to 1950 recording her exploration of the local countryside. Her diary entries ceased on her marriage with the demands of farming and family life and it was the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 1959 that led to a move to Mere where she is better known as Jane Sharp. By chance Jane re-read her diaries some four decades later. They confirmed her concern over environmental damage and mistreatment of the land and she felt they deserved a wider audience. The diaries were praised by Ralph Whitlock, Prince Charles and Patrick Holden of the Soil Association and were finally published by Hobnob Press as Foot Loose in South Wiltshire – a diary of farming and nature 1936 -1950.