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Sharon Mail was born in Glasgow on August 3, 1953. She attended Tinto Road Primary School, Broomlea School for Girls and Hutchesons' Grammar School.
In 1983, she went to Strathclyde University. As a single mother heading for divorce, she was very much focused on her course and emerged in 1986 with a BA in Business Studies.
Sharon went straight into a job, as an Organisation & Methods (sometimes know as 'Time and Motion Study') Analyst with Scottish Mutual Assurance.
She stayed with the organisation (which was swallowed up by Abbey National, which was swallowed up by Banco Santander) for 19 years, performing a variety of roles, latterly in the IT Division. In February 2005, she was made redundant.
She'd always wanted to be a writer and as much of her spare time as possible was given to her imagination.
When she was 10 she wrote a Z Cars script - Criminals by the Dozen - which was performed at school. It was a hand-written script and she took her only copy down to London on a visit. It was left behind, inside a red handbag, in the grand toy store, Hamleys, never to be seen again.
She wanted to study journalism when she left school, but was persuaded against the idea and did little writing in the following years.
That all changed in December 1993 when, whilst recovering from having all her wisdom teeth removed, she watched a BBC drama series called To Play the King, the second of the House of Cards trilogy. She was so bowled over by Andrew Davies' adaptation and Ian Richardson's mesmerising performance as scheming politician Francis Urquhart, that she decided to return to writing.
Over the next few years she wrote several scripts - shorts and full-length. A full-length script, Going Flat, about an ageing indisciplined choir in a dwindling Jewish community, won her a place on a Scottish Screen residential weekend course and generated some interest.One of her short scripts was runner-up in the drama category at the Scottish Association of Writers' Annual Conference, in March 2003.
However, she decided that it was too difficult to break into the scriptwriting world at that stage and widened her writing net - greatly helped by joining Strathkelvin Writers' Group, in 2003.
In January 2006, she managed to get a full-time job as a writer, working for the Jewish Telegraph Group of Newspapers as their Scottish correspondent. It was a very good way to begin her career as a professional writer.
After the sudden death in February 2007 of Ian Richardson, who had become a dear friend, Sharon determined to begin work on a book in his memory.
She left her employment with the Jewish Telegraph in April 2008, to focus on the book, but has continued to write on a freelance basis.
In 2008, she won the Writers' Summer School Diamond Anniversary article competition, which was in memory of journalist, Jill Dick.
She is a former Scottish Association of Writers' Public Relations Officer and has run several writing workshops and courses.
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