Diana Rosie has worked as a copywriter for over 20 years. She has created award-winning campaigns for a variety of popular brands and continues to produce copy as a freelancer for a select few clients. She also helped her husband with scripts for the films he made, both for his professional clients and also with his university students.
When the recession hit the marketing world, Diana was made redundant from her senior position at an advertising agency. Looking for something to do with her time, she started writing a novel.
As a child, she had met an old Spanish gardener, Pascual, at La Zorrita the house we owned near Pedreguer not far from where Jo and I settled in Jesus Pobre. He didn’t know when his birthday was because of the civil war. This memory sparked an idea and she soon found herself lost in a story. The background
When work began to trickle in again, the book took a back seat and it was sometime later when interest was shown in it that she decided to finish the story.
With Alberto’s Lost Birthday finished, Diana found a literary agent and, after a few publishers expressed an interest, a two-book deal was finalised with Mantle, a Pan Macmillan imprint. This is David reading it.
Diana was interviewed by Talk Radio in Spain in 2016 and here is the interview
Diana grew up in Hong Kong, took a career break to work as an adventure holiday tour leader in Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Belize and Egypt, and has travelled to destinations such as Bhutan, Kyrgyztan and Tibet. However, it is her love of Spain where her family took regular holidays during her childhood that inspired the setting of Alberto’s Lost Birthday.
Her second novel Pippo and Clara published in 2020 is about two Italian children living at the time when Mussolini ruled Italy.
She now has a website