Though I had always wanted to be a writer, as a child I never believed it was something a person like me could do. So I spent the first seven years of my working life being a psychologist instead.

After my first degree, I completed a PhD then took up a Medical Research Council Fellowship investigating frontal lobe deficits in brain-damaged patients. Realising I was on course for a lifetime as an academic, I resigned and went to Africa.

I knew that if I kept working as a psychologist I would never become a writer. The work was just too fascinating and challenging; it would leave no creative space for anything else. In Botswana I lived in a traditional village on the edge of the Kalahari Desert for two years and wrote a very bad first draft of a novel about a woman with a frontal lobe tumour.

The novel was never finished (I still have it; it was truly awful), but while in Botswana I worked in many different temporary jobs - researching drought and nutrition, counselling Zimbabwean refugees - and learnt a great deal about something called `Third World Development'. I was also initiated into the local Batlokwa tribe following a month-long women's initiation process.

When I returned to the UK, I wrote about that initiation. It was published in The Guardian and was the first step in my second career as a development journalist. My novel went into a drawer and I began touting for commissions. Six months later I was working full-time as an Editor at New Internationalist, an award-winning monthly magazine about social issues with 75,000 subscribers.

I was there for six years, during which time I developed a reputation as an analyst and commentator on global issues and was regularly commissioned by United Nations organisations (UNICEF, UNFPA, WHO) to write their major State of the World… report series. One of these - The State of the World's Women - was published as a book (Women: A World Report, Methuen), which was translated into seven languages.

At the same time I was introducing New Journalism to the pages of New Internationalist magazine. I also worked - on behalf of the NI - as a researcher-writer for the BBC and Channel Four exploring the use of drama-documentary in programmes about women's issues. Meanwhile my journalism was becoming more and more `novelistic' until, when commissioned to write factual reports about Zimbabwe and Thailand for WHO, I wrote a novel (The Children who Sleep by the River, Allison and Busby) and a book of short stories (A Tale of Two Villages).

By now I was working freelance as a development journalist, using my fees to subsidise short intense periods of time during which I wrote fiction - specifically the early chapters of The Fourth Queen (Michael Joseph), based on the true story of a Scottish girl who was captured by Moroccan pirates in the 18th Century and ended up in the Emperor's harem.

Non-fiction projects I took on during this time include a contract with Oxfam, devising new ways of portraying the Third World for a popular audience, a report on Servile Marriage for Anti-Slavery International and a report on street children in Kenya for UNICEF.

I also raised funds to write a non-fiction book about single mothers. The research took me to seven countries, where I lived for a week beside seven single mothers. The result - My Children, My Gold (Virago) - was shortlisted for the Fawcett Prize for women's writing.

The birth of my daughter brought my career as a development journalist to an end; projects involving overseas travel became impossible. By this time we were living in Newcastle, where I was invited to co-edit Writing Women, the long-running women's literary magazine, which I developed into an annual anthology published as the Virago Book of Writing Women until 2000.

This marked the beginning of a third career as a literary journalist. I also joined two writing workshops and started working again on my fiction. A £2,000 `Time to Write' grant from Northern Arts at this point kickstarted my stalled work on The Fourth Queen and I completed a first draft.

In parallel with this I began planning and fundraising for a new quarterly magazine for women writers, Mslexia, which was launched in March 1999 and has now developed into an influential publication employing six people, with a renewal rate of 85 per cent and a readership of 14,000.

These have been exciting, stressful years, during which my novel, The Fourth Queen, remained untouched - until I took out a bank loan, hired a Guest Editor and took a three-month leave-of-absence in the autumn of 2001, when I finally completed the book. It was published, to wide acclaim, by Michael Joseph in April 2003.