About Rosie Jackson

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Rosie Jackson was born in Yorkshire, but spent most of her childhood and adolescence in D.H. Lawrence country, in a mining town in the Midlands. She went to Warwick University, where she read English and Comparative Literature (and was taught by Germaine Greer), graduating with a one-year old son and a first-class degree. This was followed by three years at York University, doing a D.Phil. on Dickens and the Gothic.

In 1976 she was appointed as a Lecturer in the University of East Anglia, where for five years she taught, completed her doctorate and wrote her first book, a study of fantasy in literature. Then, while everyone else was vying to get into UEA, she got out, disillusioned with the sterile and secular world of modern academia. She travelled to India to spend time in Meherabad, the home of her spiritual master, Meher Baba (1894-1969), and returned there frequently over the next few years.

Her focus then turned much more inwards, to the life of the heart and spirit. She still did some teaching to survive – in London and Bristol – but was working more on her own personal development, art and writing. Her first foray into fiction, a collection of short stories, was published by the Women’s Press in 1991, soon after her move to Somerset and marriage to the potter John Harlow.

For almost ten years she lived in a rural community, writing, painting and running her increasingly popular writing workshops. To try to come to terms with her broken relation with her son, whose primary care she lost after her first marriage ended, she wrote her book Mothers Who Leave, discovering there were still double standards and judgements about mothers who (however unwillingly) live apart from their children, as opposed to fathers. Driven by this wound, then by another painful divorce, she did a lot of therapy work, entering ever more deeply into the life of the spirit, and travelling widely through Europe and America.

In 2002, Rosie began a three-year training with the Jaffe School of Spiritual and Medical Healing in California. This is founded on Sufi teachings and effects profound healing of the heart through love. This has become the basis of her philosophy, the inspiration of her work, and the incentive to serve others. She graduated from the school in July 2005 and was made a Sufi master teacher. Quite independently of her writing groups, she also offers Sufi workshops and individual healing sessions.

She currently divides her time between England and America, living mostly in the vibrant market town of Frome, Somerset. She won the 2006 Writers Inc. International Short Story competition with 'What the Water Gave Me, and is working on memoirs, stories, previous and new novels.