About Caroline Goldsworthy

Best Selling Author

My Story

Hi there, I am Caroline Goldsworthy, a Suffolk-based crime fiction writer. I once had a plan to write a book, and when that goal was achieved. I wrote another and then another. Now I don’t seem to be able to stop. 

I’m based in Ipswich, Suffolk (UK), but also spent my year abroad in Elizondo, Navarra. I was brought up in Colchester, I am an official Essex girl and, although I’ve been known to dance round my handbag, I don’t have any white stilettos. I do have quite a love of shoes and shiny things, so perhaps there’s time yet. 

My writing journey

I am one of those avid readers who always wanted to write a book, but I couldn’t think of a story which had any depth to it. Writing a novel is something like a marathon and so there needs to be a good story to keep you going. 

In December 2006, events in Ipswich took over the news, not only locally, but across the world. Someone was killing the local sex workers. For me I immediately noticed the difference in how the deaths were reported in the local news. Vastly different from the attitude to similar victims in the 1970s and 1980s. That started ideas popping into my head. A few years later a Cutting Edge documentary gave me additional ideas and in 2010 I started writing the novel. Safe to say – it wasn’t particularly good. And I gave up. Roll on to 2013, on holiday in Lanzarote, I split up with my husband and took myself off to the other side of the island, fired up the laptop and found my embryo novel. It was better, but still far from good. 

Then fast forward to November 2017 and an Arvon residential course called Crime Fiction Writing and Forensics. I’d been to lots of classes and read lots of books on writing craft and polishing my skills with short stories (some of which can be found here). That was the first year I did National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I wrote to the end of the novel. It was much, much better. 

Like most fledgling writers, I did the round of touting my baby to literary agents, but gave up and decided to go the independent (indie) author route. I am so glad that I did. By the following Christmas, Tangent, had been through several rounds of editing and was finally self-published. 

The following March at the London Book Fair it was shortlisted for The Selfies – the inaugural award for self-published writers.