Milly Johnson

Milly Jane Johnson is an award-winning British author of romantic fiction.[1] She is the writer of 15 best selling novels with over two million sales worldwide. She was nominated for Melissa Nathan award for Romantic Comedy in 2012, winner of RoNA Award for Comedy Romance in 2014[2] and 2016 and Winner of Channel 4's Come Dine With Me - Barnsley edition.[3][4] She is also an after-dinner speaker,[5] poet, professional joke writer, short-story writer and newspaper columnist.[6]

Biography

Born in Barnsley on 23 February 1964, she is the only child of a Glaswegian mother and Yorkshire father. She inherited her creativity and love of reading from her paternal grandparents who loved reading and the arts. Her grandfather was a miner, boxer and wrestler which brought her into contact with many of the wrestling ‘names’ of the 1970s and inspired a long-held interest in the sport. Her maternal grandfather worked on shipbuilding on the River Clyde in Glasgow.

Early life

She was an avid reader and writer of stories from a very young age and was strongly influenced by the works of Enid Blyton, The Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Catherine Cookson, Stan Barstow and Barry Hines who also gave Johnson a great love of birds and she regularly flies birds of prey at the Falcony Centre in Thirsk. She was educated at Agnes Road Primary School, Longcar Junior School and Hall Balk School for Girls. Her French teachers were Joanne Harris’s parents. An academic at school she was channelled down the route of University and studied Drama and teacher training at Exeter, St Lukes. But writing was always her first love and she left University to live in Haworth, West Yorkshire. There she befriended in the community a man she knew merely as 'Stan', little realising until at least a year after, this was Stan Barstow, a man whose books she had studied at school. She had a series of dead end jobs whilst writing jokes and poems for the greetings card market to supplement her income and became a ghost writer on Purple Ronnie in its earliest days. Later she was to become one of the country’s leading professional copywriters for the greetings card market.

She married in 1995 (divorced 2000) and had her first child in 1998, being pregnant at the same time as two of her best friends. When she sent off to an agent the idea for a book about three Yorkshire women who fall pregnant at the same time, based on her own experience of joining 'the club' of women in the know after having had babies, and the experiences derived from her parentcraft classes, she secured her first two-book deal with Simon and Schuster.[7] in 2004 when she was forty.

Books

Her first novel, The Yorkshire Pudding Club launched her unique style of humour and heart onto the market. Her first hardback release in 2018 The Perfectly Imperfect Woman sold over 400 copies in one night where readers waited approximately 2 hours in a queue for their books to be signed.

Johnson also released four shorter novellas exclusive to ebook: The Wedding Dress, a collection of short stories related to weddings (2012) and Here Come the Boys (2014) inspired by Johnson and her family missing a cruise ship two years previously. Ladies Who Launch was written in 2015 as both a sequel to Here Come The Boys and an introduction to Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Cafe. She released the 16,000 short story ebook The Barn on Half Moon Hill in May 2016 to raise funds for the Care for Claire fund to raise monies for Claire Throssell, whose children were killed in a murder/suicide by their father. In 2019, she released a book of poetry A Cat-Shaped Space, the profits of which all go to Yorkshire Cat Rescue.

Johnson’s style is humorous with a provincial 'Up-Lit' delivery but she deals with issues instantly identifiable with women all over the world primarily friendship, love, children and because of this she has an extensive readership covering a vast range of ages. Her books champion women and their friendship and community spirit and hope. She often features characters who have had dreams and plans when younger but have been ground down by life and are in need of a renaissance. Johnson was sacked from an office job in 1990 for 'having an accent suited to the textile industry', an incident, she says, which made her determined that if she ever did manage to write a book, to set it in Yorkshire. Johnson’s books, despite the joyful covers, address heavy issues. Most of them are set in her home county but all feature strong (usually) Yorkshire women. Johnson’s male lead characters have received much acclaim.

‘Strong women need stronger men. Too many times in TV dramas I see formidable women teamed up with wimpy men as if the writers are afraid that the women would look weak, by comparison, if paired up with anything else.’

She favours a third person narrative structure which allows her to shift viewpoints. She has been particularly praised for her realistic dialogue, character development and her ability to ‘build worlds to which a reader wishes to not only to escape, but in which to stay.'

Awards and Honours

Johnson’s books are published all over the world, in ebook and audio form.

  • 2014 — she won the Romantic Novelists’ Comedy Award for It’s Raining Men.*
  • 2015 — she won the Yorkshire Society Award for Arts and Culture.*
  • 2015 - she was nominated for the Romantic Novelists' Comedy Award for Teashop on the Corner.*
  • 2016 — she won the Romantic Novelists' Comedy Award for Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Cafe.*
  • 2017 - she was nominated for the Romantic Novelists' Contemporary Award for Queen of Wishful Thinking.*
  • 2018 - she became Vice President of the Yorkshire Society.*

She is a patron of the charities Yorkshire Cat Rescue and The Well, a wellbeing centre for cancer patients allied to Barnsley Hospital. And also Barnsley Youth Choir

She is active on Twitter as @millyjohnson and Facebook also on Instagram as @TheMillyJohnson

Bibliography
  • The Yorkshire Pudding Club (2007)
  • The Birds and the Bees (2008)
  • A Spring Affair (2009)
  • A Summer Fling (2010)
  • Here Come The Girls (2011)
  • An Autumn Crush (2011)
  • White Wedding (2012)
  • A Winter Flame (2012)
  • It’s Raining Men (2013)
  • The Teashop on the Corner (2014)
  • Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Cafe (2015)
  • Sunshine over Wildflower Cottage (2016)
  • Queen of Wishful Thinking (2017)
  • The Perfectly Imperfect Woman (2018)
  • The Mother of All Christmases (2018)
  • The Magnificent Mrs Mayhew (2019)
  • A Cat-Shaped Space (2019) (a book of poetry)
  • The Little Dreams of Lara Cliffe (2020)
  • My One True North (2020)

Ebook exclusives
  • The Wedding Dress (2012)
  • The Four Seasons Collection – a compilation of the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter books (2013)
  • Here Come The Boys (2014)
  • Ladies Who Launch (2015)
  • The Barn on Half Moon Hill (2016)

References
  1. WorldCat identities
  2. RoNA award
  3. http://www.romanticnovelistsassociation.org
  4. http://www.daftoldbag.blogspot.com
  5. http://www.womenspeakers.co.uk
  6. http://www.barnsley-chronicle.co.uk/
  7. http://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/
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