I was reunited with my lovely A-level English Literature teacher this week.

Back then she was (and to me always will be) Miss Gray. Now Mrs Roberts, she invited me to talk to a group of engaging and insightful students. The subject was my pet genre, dystopian literature.

Meeting up with Sue after some decades made me think about how much I owe to my education.

Without the inspiring and dedicated teachers at my state grammar school, I would never have got the grades I needed to get to UCL where I studied English Literature.

Being a graduate – together with some other experiences at University – opened doors that would otherwise have been firmly shut, however wrongly, to a girl who grew up over an ice cream shop in the north of England.

I was overjoyed when Sue found me via this website. It gave me the chance to say thank you.

Meeting her students, I touched on my own career and experiences as a writer, did a couple of readings, and we went on to discuss The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I’m now looking forward to seeing some creative writing from the young people I met.