After Dinner Speakers: Jilly Cooper, Geri Halliwell, Jeremy Healy

Jilly Cooper is an enormously popular writer of novels. And sometimes because of this popularity, people don't give her credit for her skill as a writer. One reason for Jilly's enormous popularity is that her books always leave the reader energised and uplifted. Jilly's characters, both heros and villains alike, are stalwart and tenacious, muddling through to surmount every challenge. This could merely reflect a very British attitude. After all, Jilly was born in Yorkshire to Brigadier W.B. Sallitt, O.B.E and Mary Elaine Whincup. She grew up in Yorkshire and Surrey. Her family was solidly middle class. Her father worked in the War Office during World War II and then, later in an engineering firm. She was educated in the Godolphin School in Salisbury. The pacing of Jilly's books is exquisite, never bogging down, while juggling intricate story lines that always come together at exactly the right time, very much like Dickens. She makes it look so easy. But Jilly's clean, straight-forward prose undoubtedly reflects a writer's discipline learned in her long tenure as a journalist. She was a columnist for The Mail on Sunday from 1982 to 1987, and worked for The Sunday Times from 1969 to 1982. She started as a reporter for the Middlesex Independent newspaper in Brentford, England from 1957 to 1959, and also worked as an account executive, copywriter, publisher's reader and even a receptionist. Jilly moved into the writing of fiction, almost by chance, when a friend asked her to find some fiction for a teenage magazine. Jilly couldn't find anything suitable, so wrote some stories herself.