A Doctor, novelist, medical writer and academic lawyer (specialising in corpse law if anyone asks, but they don’t). My novels encompass light comedies, serious dystopian novels and children’s fiction, and I also write a human rights based column in the UK press. I have a dog, Hergest Hound, who writes his own blog as Hergest the Brave. Between us we attempt, in our various ways, to chip away at the problems of the world.

I have been published as Joanna Bell (Entertaining Angels and Pillars of Salt) and Mary Selby (All That Glisters, Gargoyles and Port, That Awkward Age, A Wing and a Prayer). Now, after a significant period spent coccooned in my medical career and a year being deconstructed and remade by the incredible people on the UEA creative writing masters programme, I am working on a comedy novel with serious themes of identity and belonging, a children’s story about a child who finds a dodo, and a dystopian novel set in the future on the Isles of Scilly (my adopted home), exploring resistance to oppression.