Biography

Mandy was born and brought up in Northumberland. After studying piano, philosophy, maths and artificial intelligence, she became an academic, teaching programming and developing software tools for land managers and foresters. Her PhD was about situations where people disagree, particularly about environmental issues. In the mid 1990s she quit academia to campaign for the world’s forests. Since 1999 she has lived on a coastal wooded croft in Assynt, in the northwest highlands of Scotland working as a freelance writer and researcher.

Her forest-related work has ranged from research for the Centre for International Forestry Research, collaborating with scientists around the world, to helping community organisations (including Culag Community Woodland Trust and Assynt Foundation) to create visions and management plans for their land.

As an activist she has lobbied at the United Nations, worked for a Green MSP and for international environmental organisations including Greenpeace, WWF, Fern and Taiga Rescue Network.

The use of forests for the production of paper has been an abiding interest and from 2005-2009 she co-ordinated a network of more than 50 organisations campaigning for sustainable paper production. Her concern that the environmental and social impacts of the paper industry are poorly understood by non-specialists culminated in a book, Paper Trails: From Trees to Trash - the True Cost of Paper.  Published by Virgin Books/Random House in 2008, it was based on Mandy's five-month long global journey through Europe, Russia, China, South-East Asia and North America, witnessing where all the paper we use comes from.

Mandy is passionate about literature and has a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Glasgow University. She has had two collections of poetry published and her first novel, The Last Bear, was published by Two Ravens Press in 2008 and won the first Robin Jenkins Literary Award in 2009.

From 2009-10 a Scottish Arts Council writer’s bursary enabled her to take time out of forest campaigning to write about the history of climate change and human habitation in Assynt, a project called 'Assynt: Fire, Ice and Stone', pieces of prose and poetry from which are starting to be published in magazines.

Mandy plays an active role in her local community, and has worked and volunteered for many local organisations, particularly community landowners. She was a founding director of Top Left Corner, a community arts organisation, and has served on the boards of other local social enterprises.