Veronica Di Grigoli

Veronica Di Grigoli talks too fast, is addicted to tea and wishes she could speak every single language in the world. She often cannot sleep for thinking of all the things she wants to do.

She spent her childhood making things: clothes, dolls, little books of her stories, soft toys, sculptures, giant pop-up books, and origami animals. As a young girl she was very shy.

“I spent more time observing people acutely than interacting with them. If you take a step back it is easier to see into people’s hearts, no matter how many layers they wear or how well they try to hide their motives. You can sense their desires, and work out how the dynamics between different personalities really function. In my writing I aim to give the reader this insight into my characters.”

She studied Classics at University and fell in love with the history of ancient Greece and Rome, later moving to Milan then Istanbul, where she taught English and permanently felt dazzled by the language and the crowds and the stunning views of the sea, the mosques and the covered markets. This was where she had all the experiences that inspired ‘Evil Eye’, even though she didn’t write the novel until years later.

She lived in Sicily for more than a decade with her Sicilian husband and their son, cooking dangerously large portions of pasta, driving her car among maniacs, and trying to avoid sunburn at forty degrees centigrade. Her experiences there are recounted in a genre she calls a travel-novel, ‘The Dangerously Truthful Diary of a Sicilian Housewife’.

After travelling and working across three continents, she and her family live in England. She always uses her first hand experiences to write her books.

“After a childhood of detached observation, I have had an adulthood of leaping into each experience with both feet and living it as intensely as possible. I have taught English to the Soviet Mafia, and been held at gunpoint in South Africa. I’ve been trampled by a stallion and then rescued by a matador in Spain. I fell in love with every single child I looked after in an orphanage in Istanbul. Almost all my characters and situations are partly based on real events and real people.

"I never suffer from writer’s block. I just hope my lifetime will be long enough to tell all my stories.”

Visit her website: www.SicilianGodmother.com