In the Blood

About the Author

Julia Hamilton was born in 1956 in Dumfries in Scotland. Her father was a hill farmer in Kirkcudbrightshire and she went to school there until she was twelve, adopting a Scots accent during the day so that she wouldn’t stand out amongst her contemporaries. With her elder brother away at boarding school, she was a solitary child who roamed about in the landscape on her own and read a great deal. In some ways it was a lonely upbringing, but in other ways a good preparation for the life of a writer; Julia finds that she returns over and over again in her novels to the landscape she first knew. At the age of twelve, she was sent away south to Benenden School in Kent, where Princess Anne had been, forcing her to adapt to a quite different set of circumstances in an all-girl environment where hardly anyone appeared to even have heard of Kirkcudbrightshire. In her last novel, ‘Other People’s Rules’, Benenden appears under the guise of ‘Wickenden Abbey’ and caused a flurry of letters from readers wondering whether she was describing Cheltenham Ladies’ College or Roedean, a mark of success! Julia did not shine at Benenden and, having hoped to go to Oxford, found herself playing the role of performing monkey as a debutante; it was during her year at Queen Charlotte’s Ball (then held in the Grosvenor House Hotel) that a man streaked naked round the ballroom, causing a good deal of consternation amongst the assembled parents. The girls of course loved it! Julia married young and had had her two daughters by the age of 26. She had always intended to become a writer, a claim people dismissed, and published her first novel ‘The Idle Hill of Summer’ when she was 29. The novel was based on a member of her family who had been killed in the Great War and received excellent reviews. After her divorce in her early thirties from the father of her children, Julia then had several novels published by Penguin before finally moving to Harper Collins who will publish her new book ‘Forbiddem Fruits’ in June of this year. Set in Edinburgh’s New Town, the novel revolves around the powerful Macarthur Clan whose code of silence is about to be broken, engulfing them in scandal and recrimination. As well as writing and reviewing fiction, Julia has written short stories and will be contributing to the forthcoming anthology ‘Scottish Girls About Town’ to be published next year. Now married to Trevor Mostyn, an author and journalist who specializes in the Middle East, she lives in London’s Notting Hill.