Biography

Lilie Ferrari was born in London in 1949 to a mother who wrote romantic novels and a father who worked in the film industry. Her father’s family are Anglo-Italian Catholics from North London, her mother’s family God-fearing members of the Plymouth Brethren in Northumberland.

At the age of nine, and completely under the spell of Pamela Brown’s The Swish of the Curtain, Lilie wrote her first full-length novel called The Train Now Standing, about a group of children reviving a disused railway station. Alas, it was never published, but she knew then that writing would play an important part in her life.

Lilie’s family moved to Norfolk when she was twelve, and she considers herself an honorary East Anglian, since her early years were spent in Essex (which is also a part of East Anglia). Her teenage years were spent obsessing over the Beatles, and in particular George Harrison. She exchanged many letters with his mother in Liverpool, and this became the inspiration for a later novel.

However a serious career as a writer was not to happen for another twenty years, during which time among other things, Lilie was a waitress in the South of France and a teacher in California before gaining a Masters degree in French literature, writing a thesis about Flaubert and suicide. She then went on to more cheerful work at the British Film Institute where she worked in the Television Unit, taking particular interest in popular dramas and soap operas. From there she went to the BBC, script-editing EastEnders, and later writing scripts for many popular television dramas.

Lilie’s novels tend to have some connection to her own past. The story of her paternal family’s arrival in England was the basis for her first novel, Fortunata. Her second, Angelface, used the Italian Café community in Soho in the 1950’s as background, and her third, The Girl from Norfolk with the Flying Table was based on her relationship with George Harrison’s mother. In 2002 her fourth novel, Joanna and the Weatherman was published, set in Northumberland, the home of her maternal family.

Lilie currently lives and works in Norfolk.

Lilie is a member of the Writer's Guild