Gillian Jones has travelled widely, first as a teacher and subsequently with the British Council. In 1971, flying from Colombia to Brazil, over endless miles of green forest canopy, she was startled to see a yellow- orange gash in the greenery, a mark which signalled the start of the Amazonian Highway. It was an image that stayed with her and later she would write her screenplay about the destruction of the Amazon rain­forest: one which has still to reach the silver screen. She took courses with the Open University on Environmental Ethics and followed up with a novel, Blade of Light, the first of a trilogy of ‘stories of suspense with an ecological edge’. Gillian grew up in Kent, surrounded by Kentish cobnut trees. She is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London.