Having moved to Teddington from Lancashire when she got her first job at ICC in Hampton, local author Collette Lewis says she "absolutely loves" living in Teddington and that it has a "massive, strong community".

Lewis worked as a Marketing Executive at ICC for two years because she has "always been creative".

She then worked at Ogilvy One Worldwide in central London for a "very long time".

However, Lewis' second daughter was born with lifelong disabilities, so she decided to become a speech therapist, which would also enable her to help her daughter.

Thus, Lewis began volunteering at Stanley School in Teddington for two years, helping the school's speech and language therapist before taking a course at Tolworth Hospital's Speech and Language Therapy Unit.

Both Lewis' kids attended Stanley School, which she says is a "wonderfully inclusive school" and really helped her daughter with disabilities.

In an exclusive interview with Nub News, Lewis said: "I absolutely loved it [working at Tolworth Hospital], but there isn't enough funding in the therapeutic services, so I just thought I couldn't commit to it, especially as I look after my daughter and have to fight those local battles that you've got for therapy and support."

Thus, Lewis went on to study an MA in Creative Writing at Kingston University, which she says was "absolutely brilliant".

She said: After I finished my degree, I wrote plays for a little while and I had a few small successes. Then I tried my hand at script writing, but that is really, really difficult to get into. So, then I just tried writing a novel after that."

Speaking about why she decided to enroll onto the MA at Kingston University, Lewis said: "Well, I've always enjoyed reading, but I come from a family that told me I need to get a job and not just study Literature. So, I did my first degree in Literature, Economics, and Social and Economic History.

"But there was a little component of the course that was creative writing, and I really, really enjoyed it, and the tutor said, 'why don't you go on to do an Ma in creative writing?'

"But I didn't have any money for that, so I did a post-grad in Advertising because I thought that would get me straight into a job. And it did, to be fair.

Lewis says that she got a job in London "straight away" whereas many of her peers struggled.

However, as she has always enjoyed going to the theatre and been an avid reader, once she left work to look after her daughter, she bought a laptop and started writing.

"And then a year later, a friend convinced me to do the Masters at Kingston," she said.

"That's another good thing about Teddington as well - it has that community spirit, but it's also got a vibrant art community with local artists and writers being very supportive of each other.

"So of course, you've got the Landmark Arts Centre who do great classes for beginners, and that's artists and anyone interested in writing and books. But also, you've got other wonderful local writers who are there to offer any support, such as Susan Lyons who's written about 12 psychological thrillers."

Lewis says that Lyons has been "really supportive" in her writing career.

She said: "I think people are prepared to reach out and help in the community as well. And that goes for the artistic community and also local charities."

Lewis is releasing her own psychological thriller, Without Good Reason, on 19 August, which follows a retired psychiatrist Corine Alexander, who is struggling with the loss of her own child when she is asked to investigate why fourteen-year-old Mae Bailey attacked her own mother, unearthing a web of secrets and lies.

The inspiration behind Without Good Reason comes from a trip Lewis previously took to rural Scotland.

Speaking about this, she said: "We took the campervan, and we did the North Coast 500 in September 2020, during COVID when it was 'eat out to help out'.

"So, we picked up a van in Edinburgh and went across the Cairngorms to Inverness, and then we went up the east coast to John O'Groats and across the top. And the whole experience was totally therapeutic - being on the move, stopping wherever we wanted to.

"There were lots of campervan sites that you could stay on, and some in really unexpected places; on the edges of small towns and villages, some facing out to the sea with beautiful vistas, and you can free camp as well, so you could just park up in certain places anywhere.

"It was just really therapeutic, that's why I set my psychiatrist character in that kind of therapeutic area."

Lewis continued: "And I knew that I would start the novel there and come back to that as well, because I think the novel itself is all about it appears to be one way, and then it's something quite different.

"And I think that's the wonderful thing about the Scottish thing - it starts off with my main protagonist being in a bad way, and she's spiraling, but by the end of the novel, you can see why Scotland is a therapeutic place as well."



'Without Good Reason' will be available to buy in bookstores and on Amazon from 19 August (Image supplied)

The author explained that she began the novel writing process with its main idea being focused on a "young, traumatized girl who wasn't the victim".

She said: "So, I just had this really kind of traumatized person in mind. She committed a crime, but she wasn't defending herself. And it was all those questions then that went from, why wouldn't she defend herself? And who has she hurt?

"It's really unusual for a young person to attack their parents, more unusual for a girl, and even more unusual to attack a parent with a knife in that way.

"So, I kind of started my writing process from that point, of that image, and then I just asked myself lots of questions and mapped out from there."

Lewis said that she came up with the plot because she wanted to create an antagonist who is not really an antagonist and had been thinking about how the police often do not treat victims as victims.

Despite having previously read a lot of literary fiction and having studied English and European writings as part of her degree, Lewis got into reading psychological thrillers later in life, after reading Lisa Jewell's novels, who she calls a "classic psych thriller writer".

Lewis says that her first novel was "more of a literary bent, but that wasn't optioned by anybody".

However, when thinking about her next novel, she found that psychological thrillers were in the market.

Without Good Reason will be released on 19 August and will be available to buy in all bookstores and on Amazon.