Emma Cooper Author

Hello all, I’m Emma Cooper, mother of four, full-time writer, editor and creative writing tutor.

Prior to being a writer, I worked as a teaching assistant in a local junior school for eleven years. It was a job that I loved and that fitted in with life as a mother.

Time was very limited, but I tentatively began to write The Songs of Us – an idea that was a culmination of my love of music, my family and my constant ability to embarrass myself and my children on a daily basis!

I sometimes felt that there was no way I would ever finish it, but then a very close friend, who is an academic writer, told me she only wrote 500 words a day. It sounds like nothing, but when you work full-time and have a large family, I started to find that this was achievable and so I wrote 250 words in my lunch time, and the other 250 in the evening … I couldn’t believe how quickly these small sessions added up; at the end of the week I had a chapter and then as the months passed: a novel.

It took a lot of courage to begin submitting to literary agents and publishers; soon the rejections came flooding in – over thirty – until one day, an agent, Amanda Preston, emailed me to tell me she loved it and that I was ‘an incredible writer’. I remember these words because I re-read them over and over again, but this was only the beginning of what turned out to be an ‘incredible’ year.

Within two months, I had received a UK publishing deal with Headline as well as pre-emptive offers from both Italian and German publishers. I was overwhelmed to then find out it was also in an auction between six publishers in France.
My work is now translated into seven different languages.

I have since written three other novels to high acclaim: The First Time I Saw You, If I Could Say Goodbye, It Was Always You (out this summer!) and I’m currently writing my fifth novel.

As well as my job as an author, I am also an editor and mentor for Jericho Writers, where I work with published authors as well as writers just starting out on their publishing journey.