Wendy Pollard

Wendy Pollard left school at 16, when her family moved to London, and, after some routine first jobs, landed what was supposed to have been a temporary secretarial summer post at the recently established Independent Television News. By that autumn, she had become the sole Assistant to the News Editor, and remained on the newsdesk for a further 5 stimulating years.

After marrying and leaving full-time work, she enrolled with the distance-learning Open University gaining a first-class honors degree, majoring in literature. In the course of this, she became increasingly aware of the gulf between an author's academic and popular acclaim. She was later awarded a Ph.D. on this topic from the University of Cambridge.

She considered herself extremely fortunate to have found an ideal subject in the novelist and critic Pamela Hansford Johnson, who, together with her second husband, C.P. (Lord) Snow, lectured at many American universities, and who wrote a very successful satire on US campus life, 'Night and Silence: Who is Here?'.

Wendy's aim was to write a biography of an unjustly neglected author, designed to appeal to the general reader as well as to the academic market, and she hopes to continue in this way.