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Early Years
Flora Kidd was born in Liverpool, England in 1926. The youngest of four children, Flora and her family lived in the same house until she was a teen, when Liverpool was blitzed during the war. At Liverpool University she trained as a teacher and earned an arts degree, graduating in 1949. At university she met her future husband, Robert Kidd, an ex-serviceman from the war and a mechanical engineer.
First Novel
Once they were married Flora began teaching in Scotland. While pregnant with one her children, Flora was confined to her home in a small Scottish village. Feeling restless, Flora wrote her first novel which turned out to be a romance. "I didn't go for romance; it sort of grabbed hold of me," she is quoted as saying.
She found a publisher for her manuscript, which was Mills and Boon, the predecessor of Harlequin. The novel was Visit to Rowanbank and the year was 1966.
Four Decades of Writing
Flora and her family moved to Canada in 1977 and settled in Saint John, New Brunswick where they have lived ever since. By the time they moved to Canada, Flora already had a contract with Mills and Boon and had produced several novels.
She continued to write while her children were in school. Soon, she was writing more than one romance a year. In just two years alone, 1979 and 1980, she wrote an amazing ten novels.
In 1989, Flora gave up romance writing. In the 1990's, she began work on a trilogy about the famed ship, Marco Polo, which was built in Saint John. To Hell or Melbourne (1994) and Until We Meet Again (1998) and Restless Spirits (2000) have attracted considerable media attention.
Source: Fitzgerald, Sylvie. "A storyteller by chance." The New Brunswick Telegraph Journal, 23 August 2003.