Lynn Peters

'Love them. Don't know where you can send them. Cosmopolitan?'

That was Pete Townshend's response to the batch of poems I sent him - he'd just got into publishing at the time - a break from all that guitar-smashing with The Who presumably. Most of my poems were funny observations on sex but a few were about rock stars so he'd seemed a better bet than your average publisher. As he turned out to be.

My poems appeared in Cosmo in the UK, USA and Australia for over 10 years.

Since then the 'Why Dorothy Wordsworth...' poem has appeared in anthologies, been broadcast on TV and Radio 4, included in coursework for A Level and HM Prisons, and set to music by a composer in the USA. Did I mention that broadcaster Dame Jenni Murray wrote a critique of it? Or that England goalkeeper Joe Hart analysed it in an essay for his degree? Thank you, Pete Townshend!

With my poems appearing regularly in Cosmopolitan, I started writing features for them and other magazines (including She, Good Housekeeping, Psychologies). In the USA I became a contributing editor on Redbook magazine.

When a literary agent spotted my poems, she suggested I write a novel along the same lines - sex and relationships basically.

And I wrote three, all published by Simon & Schuster.

My latest novel, 'Revenge of the Ten Pound Poms', is very different. It's based on events that really happened, though not to me. It's the compelling and heartbreaking story of a family who emigrated to Australia in the 1950s, and how their dream turned to nightmare. It was imperative that their misery - and the cause of it - was kept from relatives back home. But this only added to their pain. Every family has its secrets, and this was theirs.

www.lynnpeters.co.uk