Ros has spent a lifetime tracing the threads between place, memory and the human heart. Her first novel, A Day to Remember to Forget, was accepted by Macmillan when she was twenty-seven, the beginning of a literary journey spanning decades, continents and forms.
Born in London and educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she studied History, she later lived in Scotland and France before moving to the United States. For more than thirty years Key West has been her home port, shared with her husband, the poet and light aircraft designer Allen Meece. Its shifting light and vivid sense of place shape her recent stories and poems, just as Paris, Provence and the Dorset coast return throughout her fiction.
“I’m a historian by training but a novelist by choice—a sort of hybrid, I suppose.”
Her work includes historical and contemporary novels, poetry, short fiction, a novella and a study of Virginia Woolf’s early formation as a writer. She has served as Key West’s Poet Laureate and twice as a Creative Writing Fellow at the College of William and Mary, most recently in 2012.
Teaching & literary community
Teaching has always stood alongside the writing. Ros has led poetry and prose workshops in the UK, US, Spain and Australia. In Key West she teaches creativity courses based on Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way at The Studios of Key West, as well as generative workshops in fiction and poetry. She has joined the Key West Literary Seminar as both panelist and moderator.
Her approach is generous and direct: each student already carries a creative voice; the work is to help them discover it. The same attentiveness, to other people and to weather, light, memory and place, runs through her monthly Notes on a Writing Life.