Philippa, born in South Africa and fatherless by two, experienced the wildest of rural Africa in the care of her grandfather, on safari for weeks inspecting African schools. Otherwise she was imprisoned in boarding schools, for a ‘British’ education. She has lived on deserted islands in the Indian Ocean; at the Max Planck Institute in Bavaria when her husband worked with Konrad Lorenz and she resided with an unrepentant Nazi landlady; she lectured to mature students at Bristol University; designed and built her home, an arts centre and concert hall; raised four daughters.
She lives in Somerset in her converted barns with an old collie and a long-suffering husband.
Her two (self published) works have waited for the distillation of extensive reading and mastery of poetic narrative to capture not merely the Odyssey of Mankind, led by inspired mavericks, but the desire to convey the inspiration through poetic language addressing not only the left (conceptual) but the right (spiritual, metaphoric) brain. They are ‘Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God which was awarded ‘runner-up Book of the Year ( 2013)’ by the Scientific and Medical Network and ‘A Shadow in Yucatan’ both revealing the answer to a summoning ‘call’ for deeper integration. Released from the yoke of this magnum opus she is now concentrating on short stories to evoke an understanding of the differences between old and new world characters and experiences She has been finalist in Narrative competitions twice this year (2014) and one was selected as one of Narrative’s five top stories of the year. She is currently re-working a biographic novel on the inspiration ( and the costs!) of mystical experiences that led to her understanding, and planning a memoir on her experiences of diverse and conflicted strands that was the result of straddling her Boer/British, Black/White; Old and New World influences that she believed prepared the ground for reconciling the deeper conflict between intellectual and spiritual understanding.
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