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Fran Hill is an author and retired English teacher from Warwickshire, England. She started publishing articles, features, short stories and poems in her 20s and wrote a monthly humorous column about education in the (then) Times Educational Supplement for several years.
In her 50s, Fran tried a little harder and her first full-length book Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean? (SPCK, 2020) is a funny but poignant memoir about a year in her life as a teacher.
Her first novel Cuckoo in the Nest was published by Legend Press in 2023. Set in the heatwave summer of 1976, it is inspired by Fran’s own experience of being fostered. Its narrator is bright, sarcastic, 14-year-old poet, Jackie Chadwick, newly-fostered by the Wall family. Jackie desperately needs stability but the Walls’ insecure, jealous teenage daughter Amanda isn’t happy about the ‘cuckoo’ and sets about ousting her.
Join Fran on 1 February, as she chats to Lucinda Hawksley about her writing career, including the brilliant Cuckoo in the Nest – which you may have heard featured on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.