Author Photo
Jacqueline Creek (nee Campbell) I was born in 1944 in Sheffield to the sound of the steelworks’ hammers.
My childhood dreams of becoming a surgeon were dashed as family commitments and responsibilities fell on my young shoulders. On leaving school I found work as an assistant in a chemist’s shop which motivated me to train in the dispensary.
I married at twenty-one and moved away from the family home, giving me the opportunity to try a variety of jobs, which sadly, never gave me total satisfaction.
In my early thirties, fate played a hand when a new man came into my life and changed it forever.
At the age of thirty-seven in 1981, I established Jackie’s Novelties/Fancy Dress, a fancy-dress costume manufacturing business and opened a retail outlet, both grew rapidly, requiring a workforce of over thirty people. Supplying many other UK shops with my costumes and exhibiting at Birmingham and London, the business soon began exporting to a wider market, which subsequently gave me a very different lifestyle from what I had known in the back streets of Sheffield.
I began writing poetry while in hospital following a hysterectomy for cervical cancer when I was 52. After selling the business in 2012, I decided to develop my writing further by joining writing and poetry groups. Members encouraged me to write my life story and after hearing the first chapter; I was presented with a Silver Quill award.
‘The Girl with the Emerald Brooch’ is my first published work and I am now working on a sequel – ‘The Power of Love’, and a book of poems, prose and flash fiction, affectionately called, because of my love of Yorkshire, ‘Poems, Prose and Tripe’.
Although I have been to many countries and places in the U.K. I still live near Sheffield – Penistone, a small market town in the lower Pennines, with my husband and our assorted rescue dogs, surrounded by an abundance of nature and wildlife.