Nora James
Nora was born in Stalybridge, Cheshire, England, the eldest of four children. She moved a great deal as a child, including from England to Australia, Italy and France.
From a modest family, she started part-time work at fourteen years of age in a French bakery where she did her best to ignore her favourite cake – the fraisier, a delicious strawberry confection. Despite her long days she devoured Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary at night.
She met the love of her life and now husband Dominique in high school in Paris and never looked back. After high school Nora was accepted in Hypokhagne at the Lycée Fénelon, a prestigious literary and humanities class. But financial difficulties soon forced her into full-time secretarial work and for a number of years she put on hold her dream to be a writer.
She and Dominique married young and decided to leave France in search of a better life. They migrated to Australia with two cardboard suitcases and enthusiasm by the bucket load for the land of opportunity they found. They settled in Western Australia and took turns studying at university, where Nora obtained a law degree.
Although she never stopped writing in her spare time, she worked as a lawyer for well over a decade before daring to dream again of writing as a full-time career. She had a short story and a few poems published in 2002-2003, but it wasn't until 2013 that her first novel, Dark Oil, was published by Escape Publishing.
Nora is a member of a critique group run by acclaimed author Anna Jacobs and writes every day, mostly while her young daughter is at school. She also writes screenplays and has been a finalist in several prestigious international screenwriting contests, including the Austin Film Festival and Scriptapalooza.
website: www.norajames.com.au