Jemma Spark

Jemma Spark was brought up on the west coast of Cornwall, riding her beloved pony, Spin, across the moors. Her parents were not horsey, and there were no opportunities for her compete in gymkhanas or shows. After school, she moved up to the Scottish Highlands to work as a nanny, before going down to London to study sociology, focusing on the post-war years in Britain. After she completed her degree, she travelled the world, living in South America, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. In recent years, she has been travelling around East Africa.

She has, at this point, completed twelve books in her Jill series, and also one Miscellany with a couple of short stories and a compendium of characters. Jill Crewe's world has stretched across continents and been enlarged with many new acquaintances. In Book 12 she is faced with a very real possibility of a serious relationship with a young man and this becomes an undercurrent that is currently being written in Book 13.

Out of the blue, in early 1926 Jemma Spark stepped out of the pony book genre with a dip in the nostalgic world of the early 1950s. The kingdom of Enid Blyton. She wrote a follow-on of the eight-book Adventure series. This series appealed to Jemma because it was set on the international stage and the children were perhaps a little more mature than the Famous Five.

Jemma is now trying a new thing, another novel set in the early 1950s in Britain, with a follow-on sequel to Five Go To Mystery Moor. Sniffer, now known as Pedro de Santorini, has been adopted by an extremely well-off elderly couple who have no children. He is being brought up to be the sole heir to their considerable estate. He rules the roost in his housebold. He has a stableful of thoroughbred ponies and he is a showjumping genius. His Italian palazzo style mansion is just five minutes run down the road from Captain Johnson's riding stables where the Five have gone to spend the six-week summer holiday. Pedro greets them with glee and drags them in to share his new world of glossy showlumping ponies. Undoubtedly, they will stumble into adventure!

Jemma is continuing in her mission to create a pony book universe as an escapist utopian dream of the past. Her Jill series, now with Book 13 a work in progress is set in 1964 and the challenges of the modernisation in post-war Britain. are already impinging. Jill is caught on the cusp of this wave of Carnaby Street, Rock and Roll and the emergence of a more permissible society. So, it is an interesting move back a decade to the early 1950s. Perhaps, a retreat into what lovers of this genre consider 'the best of times.'