Nicola Morgan

I’ve had an interesting life – not finished yet – and maybe one day I’ll write it up properly. Oh, the stories I could tell… But, for now, here are the bones of it.

I was born in an all-boys’ boarding school – my parents were teachers and later head teachers – and I was educated with the boys until I was 11, when I went to an all-girls’ boarding school, armed with the unhelpful skills of tree-climbing and weapon-making. To make life harder, I was always much younger than my peers – at first over three years younger and later ‘just’ two. When I arrived at the girls’ school aged 11, my classmates were 13. Bear in mind that I had never spent time with any girls apart from my younger sisters and you may guess how I floundered. No one was cruel but I was the outsider and always had to work to fit in, without ever quite knowing how to. Sometimes I did this by behaving really quite badly. Recently, I went back to my old school for the first time in 46 years and, by chance, had the opportunity to apologise to my maths teacher, at least.

I survived all this strangeness and went to Newnham College, Cambridge, meeting the man who would later become my husband. After graduating in Classics and Philosophy, I spent a year cooking (bluffing my way at every point) high-end lunches for an advertising agency and posh dinners for the wealthy people of South Kensington. I accidentally fell into a job teaching English, after being called to the wrong interview (I had offered to come and teach creative writing as an extra-curricular activity) and even more accidentally became head of department. (To be accurate, I was the department.) I then became properly trained to work with children and adults with dyslexia and that sparked what became a never-ending fascination with how brains work and how they work differently.

Meanwhile, I was desperate to be an author. ‘Desperate’ doesn’t come close, honestly. I had some early learning workbooks published but my attempts at novels were failing, over and over, for 21 years. Until, at last, my brain produced a novel worth publishing: Mondays are Red. Suddenly, life-changingly, I was the author I wanted to be. More novels and many awards followed. 

But, as you know, I’m now best known as The Teenage Brain Woman, after the 2005 runaway success of Blame My Brain and all my associated non-fiction that followed. Meeting me for the first time and hearing that I write about teenage brains and mental health, people sometimes say something along the lines of “Oh, you’re on that bandwagon!” Reader, I created that bandwagon! I was the first person in the world to write about teenage brains and minds for young people.

My husband and I have two daughters, two sons-in-law and four grandchildren. All very symmetrical. (But not at all quiet.) My daughters were teenagers when I wrote Blame My Brain but I did an excellent job of professionally detaching my observations from the research and never once blamed their brains for anything at all. Or not in public.

My family and I lived in and around Edinburgh for nearly 30 years. (My husband is Scottish and our younger daughter was born there.) I’m often called – wrongly, but it’s OK – a Scottish writer, partly because of my novel Fleshmarket, published in 2003 and still in print, thanks to the wonderful Scottish schools which use it as a class reader. Much fainting has taken place (by the teachers, never the teenagers).

My husband and I now live in a small, beautiful village in the northern wilds of Northamptonshire. When I’m not working, my time is spent looking after my own mind and body with gardening, cooking and fitness. I am a passionate grower of vegetables, herbs and edible flowers and like nothing better than to be mooching in my secluded veg plot mulling ideas for either books or recipes.

I mentioned (in the section on my work, above) that 2026 brings a new direction. I am getting back to a focus on being creative, stripping my work-life of the bits that stop me doing what I want to do most: to write in a creative, thoughtful, independent way, as I used to. It’s not a simple task, more like turning a tanker, but it will be worth it.

Do stay with me. There will be words, gardens and food for body and mind.