Jean Ure

1942

Her first book, Dance Foreign Two (1960) was published by John Goodchild Publishers when she was sixteen and still at school. Since then she has published over 170 children"s books, including the stories of Frankie Foster. She wrote her first book when she was six years old and had her first book, Dance Foreign Two published when she was sixteen. Having decided to make a career as a writer, she ran away from school and spent the next few years in a variety of jobs just to make a living. She waited tables, scrubbed floors, sold bread at Woolworths, did "..a bit of nursing, a bit of translating, a bit of cooking.." before enrolling to study drama at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art (1965-1968). She lives in a 300-year-old house in Croydon, south of London. Her most famous novel is the Point Crime novel Dance with Death. Her other novels include Plague 99, After the Plague (previously published as "Come Lucky April"), Big Tom, Family Fan Club and Shrinking Violet as well as the fantasy novel The Wizard In the Woods. Jean has now become very popular with female teenage readers around Britain with novels such as Shrinking Violet, Family Fan Club and Passion Flower, as well as many other novels. Jean"s novel, Secret Meeting, publicises the danger of chat rooms and the internet. Another of her novels, talks about the danger of going off with strangers. In a 2006 survey in United Kingdom girls magazine Mizz, they noted that Jean Ure, Jacqueline Wilson and J. K. Rowling were the most famous female authors in the United Kingdom. She says that writing her stories on her computer, drives her "bonkers". Also, many of her books deal with divorce, such as Passion Flower, a book about two girls who are sent to stay with their dad for the summer holidays. Ure also translated novels of World World War II writer Sven Hassel from his Danish to English.