FUREY, Maggie
Maggie Furey grew up in Northumberland, an area with a past rich in battle, lore and legend. She was born with a rare heart condition, and as her physical activities were very limited during her childhood, she turned to books for solace, adventure and entertainment, constructing rich worlds of imagination that have stood her in very good stead in her later career.
As she grew up, her health vastly improved by surgery, she qualified as a teacher, and went on to work as an advisor in the Durham reading and Language Resources Centre. She also organised children’s book fairs and became a regular reviewer on the BBC Radio Newcastle programme ‘Children and Books’.
“It’s clearly fate,” she says. “Whatever I did in life, it always brought me back to books. Even when I was at school I was best in English, and my teacher always said I’d be a writer.”
The prediction came true some years later when, married to Eric Furey and living in the wilds of Teesdale, she found herself out of work. “I always knew I’d write a book one day,” she says. “Ideas had been simmering in my mind for years – and suddenly, the time had come. I knew I could do this – I had never been so certain about anything in my life. Eric was a hero, supporting us while I wrote Aurian - and the rest is history.”
Nowadays, Maggie lives in Ireland with Eric, her two beautiful Ragdoll cats Merlin and Sunshine, and two tortoises, Eddie and Sparkle. In the last few years her writing career has been interrupted by a long period of ill-health and severe pain, but now she’s back in the saddle once more, and raring to go!
Her latest book, Heritage of the Xandim, returns to her original, much-loved world of the Artefacts of Power, and is the first of a series set in the momentous and turbulent era of the Mage Wars and the creation of the Artefacts. Published by Gollancz, it was published in February 2009.