Maggie Furey was born in Hertfordshire, in the North East of England, on Guy Faulks night, the 5th of November 1955. Before becoming a fulltime writer, she organized children’s book fairs, reviewed books on BBC Radio Newcastle, was an advisor in the Durham Reading Resources Centre, all on top of being a qualified teacher.

However, her muse beckoned, and when she found herself temporarily unemployed, she decided to try writing. She says of her first book, Aurian, "I grew up reading lots of fantasy, and Tolkien in particular drove me crazy, because there were no good roles for women. I'd sit there and I'd mentally rewrite Lord of the Rings with a female wizard. I guess that was the birth of Aurian." She adds, "It took me about three years to get to grips with Aurian, because I had the feeling that - especially when you don't have any publishing connections and you're going in raw - the first novel has to be the calling card, that one big hit, and I didn't want to let it out of my hands until it was as good as I could make it."

Aurian (1994) was the first book of the Artefacts of Power series, originally planned as a trilogy but eventually ending up being four books long, with Harp of Winds (1994), The Sword of Flame (1995), and Dhiamarra (1997) completing the series. Since then she has also completed the Shadowleague series, comprising of The Heart of Myrrial (1998), The Spirit of the Stone (2001), and The Eye of Eternity (2002). She plans to return to the two different worlds of both these series in the future. Maggie has also written two of the ten books in the Young Adult series The Web, Sorceress (1998) and Spindrift (1998).

Maggie lives in County Wicklow, Ireland with her charming husband Eric and an indeterminate but growing number of cats. The cats really write the stories, she says, "It seems that all authors have cats. They really write this stuff... Putting it into our heads by telepathy. In the Artefacts of Power some of my favourite characters were the telepathic big cats... I wonder where that idea came from?"

Profile by Anne M Kletcha