Barrel Coops

**Bio**

I have been a storyteller since I was nineteen, when I spent nine months travelling with a Romany family on the road to Appleby Fair. Around the campfire, they discovered that I could create stories from almost any prompt and encouraged me to tell them. This was how I paid my way. I later continued improvising stories on stage, but because of my dyslexia, I never considered writing them down.

That changed when my daughter gave me a subscription to Microsoft Office shortly before the COVID pandemic. She had grown up listening to my stories, as had many of her friends, and believed they should be preserved. The text-to-speech function allowed me to hear my work read aloud and recognise missing or repeated words that I might otherwise overlook. Since then, I have not stopped writing. I believe stories allow readers to step away from their own lives for a while and enter places, times, and experiences they need never face themselves. That sense of escape, and the enduring power of a well-told story, remain at the heart of everything I write.