Lucy Hooft is a British author currently living in Namibia, where she is the founder of a private primary school. She ¿studied languages and philosophy at Oxford, joined the Foreign Office straight afterwards, then moved to the Department for International Development (DFID), where she spent time in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, China and Sierra Leone. She left DFID to work for Her Majesty Queen Rania in Jordan, then spent several years in a jungle camp in Gabon. She describes the Sarah Black series as 'a way to record all the best bits of people I've met and places I've been... with a plot to make them much more exciting'. Lucy has always plausibly denied being a spy - but the books were written to show what that life might have been like.