BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES - MARILYN L. RICE
Marilyn L Rice was born in Chilwell, Nottingham. U.K. in February 1951.
The family moved to Derbyshire in 1960. She passed the 11+ exam and attended Lady Manners Grammar School before going to Crewe College of Education to study Divinity and Literary Studies for 3 years. She moved on to the University of Keele and read Divinity and Education for a year before gaining a B.Ed. degree.
Life, people, cultures all hold a fascination for her. She enjoyed living in the fast lane, looking for adventure and gaining as many experiences as possible. She used the College holidays to take up employment for both money and experience. She was a waitress, a barmaid, a shop assistant, a baby-sitter and even delivered the Christmas post.
She graduated in 1973 and began a teaching career in Secondary Education that was to last for twenty years. During those years, she married and, like so many of her contemporaries, divorced. She travelled, studied Leisure and Tourism, completed a writing course, worked as a p/t holiday hostess, and a market researcher.
Ill health forced her into early retirement from teaching and to take life at a steadier pace. She now spends a lot of her time writing and reading. She learned that it was extremely difficult to get into mainstream publishing and decided to take the self-publishing route.
On her 50th birthday in February 2001 she proudly launched her first book Time & Tide in a West Bromwich Shopping Mall. No Regrets followed in May 2003. Then, Stay in Touch in 2005 and on September 16th 2007 at Slaithwaite in Yorkshire she launched her fourth work, Look After Each Other. it was taken on by Strategic Book Publishing (an American Publishing Company) and is now available in hardback from them. On December 28th, 2010 they released Sofia’s Legacy, the sequel to Look After Each Other. Then, in October 2014 they published Love You Forever, the final book in her ‘Sofia’ trilogy. She launched that at the New Writers UK Book Festival in West Bridgford on October 25th 2014.
She is a member of The Society of Authors. She has exhibited at numerous book fayres and festivals including the prestigious Hay Festival and London Book Fair.
Her latest published work is The Singing Horses, based on a contest which she and numerous others entered.
During Covid she has been writing The Covid Chronicles. They began on the first day of lockdown and continued for 482 days until we had total freedom in the U.K., all restrictions moved from all areas and replaced with personal responsibility. They told of how the pandemic was going, other international events, her private life and trips down memory. She shared most of it with readers on social media and her blogs.
