Kate A. Hardy is a writer, artist and Londoner now living in France with her musician husband, their son and numerous animals. Her books include children’s story Alfi Beasti - Don’t Eat That! (highlighting the importance of eating and cooking good food), and her trilogy of novels, Going out in the Midday Sun, Staying out of the Midday Sun, and The Mad Dog Café, which explore what happens when you trade in the big city life for a new one in the countryside abroad. Her latest dystopian novel Londonia, set in post-apocalyptic London in 2072, will be published on Friday 13 March, 2020. At various times Kate has been a photographic stylist, bookshop assistant, DJ, singer in a rock n’ roll band, estate agent blurb writer, Mars Bar factory worker, cleaner, gardener, sous-chef, barmaid, waitress, architectural impressions maker and chip shop worker. Born in London in 1960, she grew up in Muswell Hill. Her penchant for story-writing began at Junior School where she produced her first full length exercise book novel, Mr Mint and the Monster. Following her school years, Kate completed a film and photography degree at West Surrey College of Art and Design, before returning to London to embark on a career as a photographic stylist, a job that, in Kate’s words, requires many ‘hats’ some of which being: detective, taxi driver, model maker, inventor, diplomat, location finder, robber, school teacher, dog trainer and actor. After moving to Birmingham in 1997, and wishing to escape the advertising world, Kate wrote and illustrated Alfi Beasti - Don’t Eat That!, inspired by the true story of her son’s refusal to eat anything that wasn’t beige. The book was published by Puffin in 2004. Moving to France that year caused another work direction. Inspired by the Southern French landscape, Kate began painting and enjoyed several years of producing overly large landscapes until house storage space became an issue. After changing direction back to writing, she completed her first novel in 2010, the semi-autobiographical Going Out in the Midday Sun, then completing the two further books in the trilogy by 2013. Kate started writing Londonia in 2015. She is currently writing a sequel and has plans for further books as part of a series. When not writing, Kate enjoys messing about with paint, ink and paper, walking with the family greyhounds, psycho-geographic wandering in London, singing, reading, improvised cooking, and attempting to grow food. “I spend most of my life musing on just about everything,” she says. “The shape of Romanesque cauliflowers, what is beyond our galaxy, trees in general, clouds, why we don’t have tails anymore, why people desire cars that are unusable to take stuff to the dump in, the ludicrousness of humans in general, the beauty of just about everything else. I don’t ever think about sport. Maybe snooker occasionally…”