I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1961. I left when I was seven years old and since then I have travelled as much as I can and have lived for lengthy periods of time in England, Germany, Canada and Greece. I own passports from South Africa, Canada and the UK (I'd dearly love one from Australia).

I am presently based in the west coast of Ireland in a little hamlet called Tir na Spideoga  - about an hour west of Cork city - where I live with my partner David Crean and Rónán our foundling cat.

From an early age I was encouraged to be self-motivating, to experiment with what life had to offer. When I was thirteen I decided not to go to school anymore. I had already been to a number of schools and enjoyed none of them, so I taught myself and went on to obtain a B.A. in Classical Studies from the University of Bristol.

I have experimented with a number of different jobs and vocations - from photography to house cleaning to counselling to mime to cooking to acting to Jeet Kune Do practitioner to website project manager for CIBC, a rather large bank in Canada. However, I always thought I'd be a 'writer' when I grew up and although like many of us I wrote tortured poetry in my teens and twenties, this 'growing up' happened rather late. My first fiction publication was in 2008 ('La Llorona' in Versal 6) when I was 46 years old. Since then I have had a number of short stories published in literary magazines and journals and several shortlistings and honourable mentions in literary competitions. Recently my short story manuscript A SORT OF WALKING MIRACLE was shortlisted for The Scott Prize (Salt Publishing). I am a two-time finalist of NaNoWriMo.

This year, 2010, I have been awarded a Canada Council for the Arts Grant to Professional Writers. This grant is to develop my first draft novella SERENDIP into a novel. SERENDIP is set in Sri Lanka during the early 80s. It is about the journey of Helen, who thinks she is going to luxuriate on a beach and gaze at her navel, but she's arrived at the beginning of a full scale armed conflict...

Full details of awards and works published can be found in my CV.

I cultivated the on-line writer's group at Gaia.com called Diving Deeper: A Writing Workshop for three years, where at times there were over 300 members. When Gaia shut down in March 2010, I rebuilt the group at Ning: Diving Deeper: A Writing Workshop.

I also lead Diving Deeper writing retreats in Europe and North America and occasionally I mentor writers via email and telephone.

All my writing is based on an extraordinary approach called Freefall. This was taught to me by the wonderful Barbara Turner-Vesselago. For me, Freefall was the key that opened the floodgates, and it is the key that keeps me going.

As Barbara says on her website, "Freefall invokes the courage to fall without a parachute, into the words as they come, into the thoughts before they have fully formed in the mind, into the unplanned structures that take shape, without prompting, to contain them."

My general goals as a writer are perhaps rather lofty: to explore the full breadth of the human condition. I write what I 'know' and I also write to discover what I don't know. I write about the price we pay for living, about the consequences of action and thought. I write to discover the good in the darkest situations and people. I write about experiences that push us to or over the edge of our envelope of safety, and I write to push myself beyond that envelope.

Sandra Jensen CV