Catherine Cookson - Britain's Most Widely Read Novelist

Catherine Cookson was born Catherine McMullen in an industrial region in the northeast of England. Like many great writers she had a difficult early life. She was illegitimate and her mother was poverty-stricken, an alcoholic and occasionally violent. Cookson had only a minimum of education and from the age of thirteen she suffered from hereditary hemorrhage telangiectasia. For many years Cookson believed that she had been abandoned as a baby and that her mother was actually her older sister.

She had the heart of a storyteller, even then:

"I was a story-teller from the time I could talk, and if I could get an audience, if I could get someone to listen to me... I used to pass the time, telling myself wonderful stories about us living in a nice house with lino on the stairs... one of the best ones I've ever told was about the wee folk, the little green men talking to me." (from Richard Joseph's Bestsellers, 1997)

Cookson was determined to become a writer from an early age. She wrote her first short story, THE WILD IRISH GIRL at the age of eleven. At thirteen Cookson left school and started working as a maid, where she gained valuable insight into the society and class structure of England. She also worked in a laundry, saving enough money to move into an apartment hotel in Hastings. There she met Tom Cookson, a schoolmaster who she married in 1940 when she was 34.

After several unfortunate miscarriages she was diagnosed with a rare vascular disease and had a mental breakdown. She began to write again for therapy. She joined the Hastings Writer's Group for encouragement. During this period she started writing short stories. Her first published book, KATE HANNIGAN (1950), was somewhat autobiographical. Due to her depiction of childbirth in the beginning, her neighbors tried to stop the book's publication.

In the story Kate, a working-class girl, becomes pregnant by an upper-middle-class man. The child is brought up by Kate's parents and she believes them to be her real parents, and Kate to be her sister.

Although many Catherine Cookson novels have appeared on film and stage, she achieved her greatest media success on television. A series of dramas on British ITV lasted over a decade and achieving huge ratings. Eighteen Cookson adaptions were made, regularly attracting more than 10 million viewers each. The first was an adaption of The Fifteen Streets (1989) starring Sean Bean and Jane Horrocks, which became hugely successful. The Black Velvet Gown followed (1991) and won the International Emmy award for best drama. In 1994, Catherine Zeta Jones played a supporting role in The Cinder Path and the same year also saw Tracy Whitwell and Ray Stevenson in The Dwelling Place. Ray Stevenson also appeared in The Tide of Life (1996) with Gillian Kearney and future Rome co-star James Purefoy. Another very popular movie was the 1995 adaption of 'The Gambling Man' starring Robson Green.