Penny Jordan was a storyteller long before she began to write romantic fiction. At the age of eight, she was creating serialized bedtime stories, featuring make-believe adventures, for her younger sister who was always the heroine.

After reading a serialized Mills&Boon book in a woman's magazine, she fell in love with the hero. Penny was eleven and she quickly became an avid fan.

Her goal, when writing romance fiction, is to provide readers with an enjoyment and involvement similar to that she experienced from her early reading. She likes nothing more than to hear her fans share her love: romance.

She works from home, in her kitchen, surrounded by four dogs and two cats, and welcomes interruptions from her friends and family.

Penny believes in the importance of love, including the benefits and happiness it brings. It's the special bonds linking Harlequin readers and writers that she personally treasures!


Cathy was born in the West Indies and has been writing Mills&Boon romances for some 11 years. She is a great believer in the power of perseverance as she had never written anything before (apart from school essays a lifetime ago!), and from the starting point of zero has now fulfilled her ambition to pursue this most enjoyable of careers. She would encourage any would-be writer to have faith and go for it!

She loves the beautiful Warwickshire countryside with her husband and three children, Charlotte, Olivia, and Emma. When not writing she is hard-pressed to find a moment's free time in between the millions of household chores, not to mention being a one-woman taxi service for her daughters' never-ending social lives.

She derives inspiration from the hot, lazy, tropical island of Trinidad (where she was born), from the peaceful countryside of middle England and, of course, from her many friends, who are a rich source of plots and are particularly garrulous when it comes to describing Mills&Boon heroes. It would seem, from their complaints, that tall, dark, and charismatic men are way too few and far between!

Her hope is to continue writing romance fiction and providing those eternal tales of love for which, she feels, we all strive.


Sarah was born in Wiltshire and started writing at the age of eight when she produced an autobiography of her hamster.

At the age of 18 she travelled to London to train as a nurse in one of London's top teaching hospitals, and she describes what happened in those years as extremely happy and definitely censored!

She worked in a number of areas after she qualified, but her favourite was A&E where she found the work stimulating and fun. Nowhere else in the hospital environment did she encounter such good teamwork between doctors and nurses.

By now her interests had moved on from hamsters to men, and she started writing romance fiction.

Her first completed manuscript, written after the birth of her first child, was rejected by Mills&Boon, but the comments were encouraging, so she tried again, and on the third attempt her manuscript Worth the Risk was accepted unchanged. She describes receiving the acceptance letter as one of the best moments of her life, after meeting her husband and having her two children.

Sarah still works part-time in a health-related industry and spends the rest of the time with her family trying to squeeze in writing whenever she can. She is an enthusiastic skier and walker and loves outdoor life.


Catherine George was born in a village on the Welsh-English border, where the public library featured largely in her life. Her mother, who looked upon literature as a basic necessity of life, fervently encouraged Catherine's passion for reading, little knowing it would one day motivate her daughter into writing her first novel.

At 18, Catherine met her husband, who after their marriage swept her off to Brazil, where he worked as Chief Engineer of a large gold-mining operation in the mountains of Minas Gerais, a setting which later provided a very popular background for several of Catherine's early novels.

Nine happy years passed there before the question of their small son's education decided their return to Britain.

Not long afterward a daughter was born, and for a time Catherine lived a fulfilled life as a wife and mother who always made time to read, especially in the bath! Her husband's job took him abroad again, to Portugal, West Africa, and various countries of the Middle East, but this time she stayed home with the family. And spent a lot of lonely evenings in between the reunions when her husband came home on leave.

''Instead of reading other people's novels all the time,'' he suggested one day, ''why not have a shot at writing one yourself?'' So Catherine did.

But first she took a creative writing course. Encouraged by the other students' enthusiasm for her contributions, she decided to try her hand at romance, and read countless Mills & Boon novels as research before writing one herself. Her first novel, which Romantic Times voted best of its genre for that year, was accepted, along with all 54 written since.

These days son and daughter have fled the nest, but they return with loving regularity to where Catherine and her husband -- back for good from his travels -- live, with Prince, the most recent Labrador, in a house built at the end of Victoria's reign in four acres of garden on the cliffs between the beautiful Wye Valley and the River Severn.


Jennie Lucas had a tragic beginning for any would-be writer: a very happy childhood. Her parents owned a bookstore and she grew up surrounded by books, dreaming about faraway lands. Her mother read aloud to her in French when she was little; when she was ten, her father secretly paid her a dollar for every classic novel (Jane Eyre, War and Peace) that she read. Jennie covered her bedroom with travel posters and always had her nose in a book.

At fifteen, she went to a Connecticut boarding school on scholarship. She took her first solo trip to Europe at sixteen then put off college and traveled around the U.S., supporting herself with jobs as diverse as gas station cashier and newspaper advertising assistant.

At twenty-two, she met the man who would be her husband. For the first time in her life, she wanted to stay in one place as long as she could be with him. After their marriage, she graduated from Kent State University with a degree in English and started writing books a year later.

Jennie was a finalist in the Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart contest in 2003 and won the award in 2005. A fellow 2003 finalist, Australian author Trish Morey, read Jennie's writing and told her that she should write for Harlequin Presents. It seemed like too big a dream, but Jennie took a deep breath and went for it. A year later, after seven years of writing and eight finished manuscripts, Jennie got the magical call from London that turned her into a published author.

Since then, life has been hectic, juggling a writing career, a sexy husband and two young children, but Jennie loves her crazy, chaotic life. Who needs a clean house? Every day, Jennie gets swept into drama, glamour and passion. Now if she can only figure out how to pack up her family and live in all the places she's writing about!


Annie spent her formative years on the east coast of Australia and grew up in a book-loving family. One of her earliest memories is of lying tucked up in bed, drowsy after an afternoon's adventure in the rainforest gully that was her backyard, and listening to her father read The Wind in the Willows. She got hooked on romance early. In her teens she spent long afternoons playing tennis with her best friend. Between endless games on baking gravel, they'd stagger to her friend's house to recover, and in that house was an unending store of books, all with that distinctive rose on the cover. That's how Annie discovered romance and she's been addicted ever since. All those strong silent types, flashing-eyed Italians, haughty Spanish aristocrats and the rest.

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