Jan Lloyd

Jan Lloyd wrote her first novel forty years ago, put it in a wardrobe, and published it at seventy-three. Her books were worth the wait.

Jan spent her career in classrooms teaching mathematics and science, and later working with students learning English as an additional language. The patience and precision that work required never left her. It is there in every page of her novels: research-grounded, carefully observed, and quietly assured.

She also spent forty years with an unpublished manuscript in a wardrobe.

Jan wrote the first book in what would become the War Torn trilogy long before the genre had a name. She was told, as writers of a certain era were often told, that nobody wanted WW2 novels. So the manuscript stayed where it was. It took her daughter reading it and refusing to let it disappear to change that. Jan Lloyd was seventy-three when War Torn was published. The book found its readers almost immediately.

The War Torn trilogy follows Frances Meyer, a violinist whose life becomes entangled with an enemy U-boat commander. It is a story about the impossible choices war forces on ordinary people, and about the kind of love that persists anyway. Her novel Fragments of Time takes that same theme connection that refuses to be bound by circumstance into stranger territory: a 1964 woman and a soldier who insists, with complete conviction, that the year is 1914.

Jan lives in Mid Wales with her husband. She is proof that some stories wait for exactly the right moment.