Biography

'Hertfordshire writer’s first novel …at 80!'
This was the heading in the local press when playwright and journalist Mary Rensten published her debut novel, Too Strong A Light, in October 2009.

After schooldays in Jamaica Mary trained for the stage at PARADA (RADA’s overflow branch, created to cope with the huge post-war influx of students) but gave up acting in favour of teaching. She wrote plays for her pupils but it was not until 1975, married and with three children, that she began writing professionally, alternating plays for amateur performance, which were then published, with a successful career as a freelance journalist, specialising in interviews, many of them well known writers, for example, Thomas Keneally,
Arnold Wesker, Maya Angelou, Diana Athill, Deborah Moggach.

She has written scripts for radio and television and had plays on the London Fringe, notably The Yellow Wallpaper and A Common Woman. Other work includes community dramas, teaching material, a non-fiction book - on monumental brasses! - and a musical.

Mary is a Vice-president and former Chair of the Society of Women
Writers and Journalists. She is now working on her second novel, set in Hertfordshire in 1712.

Too Strong A Light by Mary Rensten
SCRIPTORA (ISBN 978-0-9562494-0-1)
£7.99

Starting in Enfield and Hertford, this compelling story moves swiftly to Malta in 1995, with flashbacks to the Second World War, as crime writer Jane Thornfield, separated from her husband Neville and researching for a new, possibly romantic, novel, uncovers the dramatic and startling secret of her Hertfordshire family’s connection with the war-torn island. What happened in 1942 cannot be undone, but it is not too late for Jane to change her own disordered life.

“Once you start reading this book you won’t want to put it down until
the end.” The Woman Writer.

Available from Books@Hoddesdon
Email: enquiries@booksat.com