When Susan was six years old, she was asked the usual question about what she wanted to be when she grew up. Her answer? 'I want to travel round the world and write about animals.'

By the time she was eighteen, she’d made it as far as London. After gaining a BA in English Literature and winning the Edmé Manning Prize for the highest first-class degree of that year, she went on to study for an MA, also at London University.

Her first significant travel experiences came when she was awarded a one-year scholarship to study creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, USA and then a Rotary Foundation Scholarship to pursue postgraduate research in drama, specialising in playwriting, at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Once back in the UK, she worked as playwright and workshop facilitator for Something Permanent Theatre Company and won the Daily Express/Classic FM Woman of Tomorrow Arts Award for her writing and educational work.

Next came a stimulating two years on a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship in Australia. Based in Adelaide as a writer and researcher, Susan was awarded Visiting Academic status for the length of her stay.

She has since returned to her native Wales where she works as a full-time writer, performer and tutor of creative writing. She has been invited into membership of Academi in recognition of her contribution to literature in Wales and is a Fellow both of the Royal Society of Arts and the International League of Conservation Writers.

More recently, Susan's travels have taken her to the Arctic. Thanks to a Churchill Memorial Travel Fellowship, she journeyed through Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland in the footsteps of an intrepid eleventh century female Viking, and was invited, on her return, to Buckingham Palace to receive her Fellowship medal.

In July this year, Susan will return to the Arctic, this time to Svalbard, thanks to support from the Gino Watkins Memorial Trust, in order to pursue research relating to her new writing and performance project.

With the publication of her poetry collections, Where the Air is Rarefied (2011) and Creatures of the Intertidal Zone (2007), inspired by her Northern journeys, environmental issues and the wildlife of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, Susan’s childhood vision of travelling round the world to write about animals seems to have been fulfilled.