Janet studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, and Graphic Design at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, and later went on to read for an MA Honours degree in Italian and Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, where she also studied Russian, Farsi, and Classical Arabic. She holds a PGCE (ESOL) and an MA (TESOL) from the University of London Institute of Education. In 2012 she was awarded an MA Creative Writing with Distinction by The Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.
She has worked extensively in journalism and educational publishing, and in the 1990s was the Editor of several ELT magazines including Practical English Teaching, New English Digest, The Longman Language Review, and Club Magazine. She was also Reviews Editor for BBC English Magazine and an advisor to English Teaching Professional. She served on the Editorial Board of the Studies in Self-Access Learning Journal (SiSAL), edited TESOL Arabia Perspectives, and was a reviewer for Learning & Teaching in Higher Education Gulf Perspectives.
In addition to articles and short stories, she has published over forty English language textbooks, courses and readers, among them That’s English (BBC English/Spanish Ministry of Education), Linguaphone Children’s English (Winner of the Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union Prize), Formula (Macmillan), Lifestyle (Zanichelli), and At Home With Italian (Reader’s Digest Association).
From 1972 to 1986, Janet lived in Sicily, teaching language and literature at the University of Palermo. Palermo later became the setting for her draft novel, Foreigner, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Telegraph Harvill Secker Crime Writing Prize.
Over the years she conducted Teacher Development workshops and worked on ELT projects and Ministry of Education consultancies in a variety of countries including Portugal, Spain, Malta, Germany, Russia, Finland, Estonia, Croatia, Bosnia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Argentina, Cyprus, Korea, Indonesia, and Kenya. In 1996 and 1997, she ran a series of writers’ workshops in Bali, Indonesia, and in Nyeri, Kenya.
Janet moved from the UK to Poland in 1998 to join the British Council as their Young Learner Educational Consultant in Wroclaw, working as part of a British Council team responsible for developing a nationwide Teacher Training and Trainer Training program.
From Poland, Janet transferred to the Arabian Gulf to work as a textbook author within the English Language Curriculum Department (ELCD) of the Ministry of Education of the Sultanate of Oman. From 2002 to 2017, at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, she set up and managed two Independent Learning Centres.
A certified NLP Practitioner since 1994, Janet went on to qualify as a writing and life coach in 2012. She is a member of the Society of Authors, and the National Association of Writers in Education. In June 2015, Janet founded The Abu Dhabi Writers’ Workshop, which she ran for three years before leaving the UAE in 2018. She now lives in Portugal, where she writes full-time.
