Jo Reed grew up in a small village not far from Ashby de la Zouch, England, in an area famed for the production of lavatory bowls. In the absence of adequate entertainment outside school hours, her main childhood pastimes were reading, writing, sliding down slag heaps and playing bows and arrows under the wheels of lorries in the local transport café parking lot. Jo attended school reluctantly, spending most of her time writing fantasy stories on sweet wrappers and avoiding homework. At fourteen she took her first holiday job at a local clay factory, where she distinguished herself as a Sagger Maker’s Bottom Knocker and simultaneously discovered Juicy Fruit gum and Woodbines.
In 1971 she moved to the West Country, where she continued to write on sweet wrappers while pretending to study ‘A’ levels. She moved into the first of many shared flats in Bristol, and started to wear a Kaftan.
In 1981 Jo was, surprisingly, offered a place at the University of Bristol, where she studied psychology and philosophy and, later, computing and artificial intelligence. She went on to become a researcher in the study of animal behaviour and genetics, before taking up a lecturing post. She has lectured in psychology, physiology and computing ever since. In the late nineties she also set up her own small business, producing computerised designs for knitting machines and writing articles for knitting magazines.
In 2002, a clearout of her loft unearthed a shoebox full of sweet wrappers dating back to 1964. All of them had fragments of fantasy stories on the back. Jo stopped knitting in the evenings and started writing again. She has been writing ever since. Her work with behaviour and genetics gave her the inspiration for a dark fantasy tale of madness and eugenics, set against a backdrop of historical Britain. The Tyranny of the Blood, the first in what eventually became a series, was published in 2009 by Wild Wolf Publishing. Jo is now working on the fifth novel in the series, three of which have been finalists in the Arts Council England supported ‘Book of the Year’ awards over the last two years.
Jo won the Daily Telegraph Travel Writing award in 2008, and has had short stories published in magazines as diverse as Mslexia, Lancashire Magazine and The People’s Friend. In 2008/9, she won an Arts Council supported Apprenticeship with Adventures in Fiction for ‘The Tyranny of the Blood’, which was subsequently taken up by Wild Wolf Publishing in May 2009.
She now lives in rural Somerset, where she lectures in physiology, psychology, social science and study skills, and divides her free time between writing, a chihuahua and causing havoc with the pointy end of a yacht.