Sakina took her happy, semi-rural childhood to the grim cities and towns of West Yorkshire for her twenties and found the magic in those places too. In eight years of jobbing between office work and film and TV, she wrote and produced one eight minute film of which she is openly critical and secretly proud (Precog…?). She returned to beautiful Cumbria with an honours degree in English and Communication Arts and now combines part-time geese farming and a full time job in a public health service with hedonistic cookery and compulsive bouts of writing. Autotherapy is her first novel.

Web links: www.northeastmovies.co.uk/films/99/precog - film http://soulsubsistence.wordpress.com - food