About Hazel
Hazel Buchanan was born and raised in a small coastal town at the foot of the South Downs in East Sussex, England. She was educated at Brighton and Hove High School and at the University of Bristol, from where she graduated with a Bachelor of Laws. She was married a week later and, soon after, emigrated to Australia to settle just outside a little town in the mountains of northern New South Wales.
After helping her husband establish a high quality timber furniture-making business, Mountain Top Timbers, Hazel turned her focus to teaching music. She currently teaches woodwind at an Independent school on the mid-north coast, plays oboe in a number of ensembles and runs the local Shotokan Karate Dojo. As well as a husband, Hazel has three sons, three chooks, a pony and two border collies.
A Word From The Author
Apart from the experience of having written for as long as I can remember, I have no formal writing qualifications. So when it comes to writing an author's biography, despite having studied for a Law degree, it seems I have little of commercial value to include.
I am told it was actually through writing that I learned how to read. At the age of three, I had a little notebook in which I liked to record my parents' and siblings' dinner choices for the day. Whether these menus were ever delivered, I really can't say. But I do remember my family dutifully spelling out the meals they would have chosen were someone willing to prepare them.
I love reading. I always have. As a child, the perfect school holiday was spent lying in a chair in the lounge room, a book for that day in my hands, with the knowledge that one bookcase of unexplored treasures stood behind me and another awaited on the landing upstairs. I was lucky to have books so readily available at home and a library down the street. I made the best possible use of both opportunities.
My passion is writing. Short stories were my genre as a child, although the ambition for a novel was already there. "The trees grew thickly and were beautiful, with dark shining leaves," was an opening I remember creating at the age of eight or nine. It was then that I secretly decided I would be an author when the time came for me to go out into the world.
Back then, I would not have accepted that the realities of life and the need to make a living have a tendency to intrude upon our childhood fantasies. My dream has certainly taken many more years than I would have liked to begin to come true, but, then again, I have learned a lot along the way.
