Alexandra Sellers
Alexandra Sellers started dreaming about exotic locales at the age of 10, when she first cracked the cover of a small collection of tales and pictures called "The Arabian Nights". The stories were taken from "The Thousand and One Nights", and names like Samarkand, Shiraz, and Baghdad still carry a magic for her which no amount of current history can overshadow. The stories must have triggered something else in her, too, for it was at this time that she first began to dream of writing herself. Following the advice of Jane Austen, though she hadn't read it yet, Alexandra wrote her first story about the world she knew, her cat. And following her own imagination, she wrote the cat's story from inside the cat's head.
After beginnings like this, it flows naturally that her two favourite forms of fiction should become romance and science fiction. Her first romantic short story sold in 1980 to the first magazine she sent it to, and her first science fiction was simultaneously rejected. She was too naïve to realize how lucky she was with the romance story, and it never occurred to her to send the science fiction story to a different publisher. She concentrated on romance, and her only serious foray into that other world so far has been the fantasy satire Spoken Cat, published in 1997.
Alexandra's favourite hobby is the learning of foreign languages, of which she has so far studied eight, sadly without becoming fluent in any. One of the most enjoyable periods in her life was the three years that she spent at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where she was the first student ever to graduate in the double degree of Persian and Religious Studies.
Alexandra lives with her husband, Nick, and a cat named Monsieur. The two of them are equal parts maddening and indispensable to her happiness. Alexandra once sat down to try and count how many different places in her wandering life she has called home. She gave up when she reached 40 homes in 12 cities and towns in six different countries. But she hasn't visited nearly as many places as she'd like yet. In between bouts of travel and university, Alexandra has been a full-time writer since the publication of her first novel in 1980.
