Hannah Colby
Hannah Colby was born in Norwich where her father was stationed, serving as an Intelligence officer. After her parents divorced at the end of the war, Hannah and her brother lived in Chelsea with their artist mother.
Hannah went to day school in London.- her brother was away at boarding school - but they spent all their holidays with their American grandmother in Jersey. At school she piano and viola lessons and, although never a good musician herself, grew to love both instruments. A lonely child, she developed a lifelong interest in music and language. Her mother taught her to paint and draw, setting up a little easel beside her own. However, she paid little attention to her children’s education or future;and Hannah left school at 15. Returning from ten years in Africa, her father was horrified by bohemian girl she had grown to be; he sent her to be ‘finished’ in Paris’s chic 16th arrondissement. There, she soon learnt good French and developed a passionate interest in French art, architecture, literature and opera, spending the next year going daily to the Sorbonne where she studied for a diploma in French Civilisation.
Hannah married an army officer and had four children. She studied painting in Chelsea with Polish artist, Marian KratochviÍ. After living briefly in Warwickshire, they moved to Suffolk in 1969, where she and her husband set up and ran a day centre for young disabled adults, which is still a going concern. She returned to London, where she taught painting and English as a Foreign Language whilst working at the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Centre and then for Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC.
In 1990 Hannah moved back to Suffolk and married again. The couple bought a Chartreuse in South West France where Hannah pursued her passion for house renovation and garden design. She continued to paint, concentrating on her favourite subject - the human face - and travelled to Nepal, Australia and Japan.
Sadly forced to sell up in France, Hannah and her husband settled first in the Norfolk countryside and then Norwich. It was there that Hannah joined a short Creative Writing course. The class was asked to produce a short story inspired by photographs brought by their tutor. Hannah chose the image of a girl with sad eyes, playing a violin or viola. Asked who her character was, she told the class: 'This is Irena and she comes from Sarajevo' Hannah wrote her story around this girl and Daniel, a musician. The exercise finished, she discovered she had created two characters who began to inhabit her mind against the background of an episode in history which had always haunted her – the Siege of Sarajevo and the war in Bosnia. Unable to leave her new story, she found herself at her laptop day and night until she had written 150,000 words within a few weeks. Then came the long process of editing and seeking advice, before Hannah began to think she might have written something that could be called a novel. It underwent several metamorphoses and a series of different titles until it emerged in its present form as ' Place of Springs'.
