Jean Ure
Encyclopedia
Background
Jean Ure was born and brought up in a suburb of London and attended school in Croydon. She wrote her first book when she was six years old and had her first book, Dance For Two published when she was sixteen. Having decided to make a career as a writer, she ran away from school and spent the next few years in a variety of jobs just to make a living. She waited tables, scrubbed floors, sold bread at WoolworthsWoolworths Group
Woolworths Group plc was a listed British company that owned the high-street retail chain, Woolworths, as well as other brands such as the entertainment distributor Entertainment UK and book and resource distributor Bertram Books...
, did "...a bit of nursing, a bit of translating, a bit of cooking..." before enrolling to study drama at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art (1965-8). She married a fellow student, Leonard Gregory, in 1967.
She lives in a 300-year-old house in Croydon
Croydon
Croydon is a town in South London, England, located within the London Borough of Croydon to which it gives its name. It is situated south of Charing Cross...
, south of London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Her most famous novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
is the Point Crime novel Dance with Death. Her other novels include Plague 99
Plague 99
Plague 99 is a 1989 novel written by Jean Ure. It deals with a pandemic that shuts down London and group of three teenagers that survive the outbreak. The book takes an apocalyptic view and details the event of the three principal characters at the end of the year 1999 as the plague wipes out the...
, After the Plague (previously published as "Come Lucky April"), Big Tom, Family Fan Club and Shrinking Violet as well as the fantasy novel The Wizard In the Woods
The Wizard in the Woods
The Wizard in the Woods is a 1990 children’s fantasy book by Jean Ure and the first book of The Wizard trilogy.-Plot:The story begins with the wizard exam of second class jr. wizard Ben Muzzy. Things go awry when he accidentally teleports himself to a mysterious forest...
. Jean has now become very popular with female teenage readers around Britain with novels such as Shrinking Violet, Family Fan Club and Passion Flower, as well as many other novels.
Jean's novel, Secret Meeting, publicises the danger of chat room
Chat room
The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing...
s and the internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. In a 2006 survey in UK girls magazine Mizz, they noted that Jean Ure, Jacqueline Wilson
Jacqueline Wilson
Dame Jacqueline Wilson, DBE, FRSL is an award-winning English author, known for her vast and diverse work in children's literature. Her novels have been adapted numerous times for television, and commonly deal with such challenging themes as adoption, divorce and mental illness...
and J. K. Rowling
J. K. Rowling
Joanne "Jo" Rowling, OBE , better known as J. K. Rowling, is the British author of the Harry Potter fantasy series...
were the most famous girls authors in the United Kingdom. Jean Ure has no children and lives with her partner and a zoo of animals in her London home. She says that writing her stories on her computer, drives her 'bonkers'.
Jean has written several books for teenage girls about boys, such as 'Love and Kisses' which is about a sensible girl who falls for an unsuitable boy and starts lying to her parents in order to see him. Also, many of her books deal with divorce, such as Passion Flower, a book about two girls who are sent to stay with their dad for the summer holidays.
Ure also translated novels of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
writer Sven Hassel
Sven Hassel
Sven Hassel is a Danish-born soldier and writer who has written pseudo-autobiographical novels based on his experiences in World War II.-Biography:...
from his Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
to English.