Sue Whisstock was born in Woodbridge Suffolk, where her father was a boat-builder. Growing up among boatbuilders, sailors and fishermen and hearing traditional stories and songs, she began writing her own stories and poems.

A sociology graduate, she moved to London and then Oxfordshire, where she now lives, to begin a teaching career. Later, while working with adults and listening to other lives and backgrounds, Sue began writing full length fiction.

After studying at Oxford University for the Diploma in Creative Writing, Sue went on to study for her Masters in Creative Writing at Brunel University under the professorship of Fay Weldon, tutored by Celia Brayfield.

In 2017 Sue published her family memoir: ‘A History of Whisstock’s Boatyard’, a photographic archive, portraying 60 years of a family boatyard building classic wooden yachts, which has sold some 600 copies. She now gives regular talks in her native Suffolk.

In 2024 she published her novel ‘Crosswinds’. This historical wartime novel is set in England and America, spanning the second half of the twentieth century. Across continents and generations the novel explores societies’s attitudes to careers, sex and families, which cause a mother and her daughter to make some difficult choices.

From the author:

I began this book because I wanted to write the kind of story I like the most - one of those books you can't put down and have to stay up late to finish! I found inspiration from stories my mother-in-law told me about the years when she was a Royal Navy Wren during WW2 and once I'd started it was almost as if the characters were telling the story for me. In fact, I would wake up with a conversation going on in my head and have to quickly write it down on a notepad by the bed before I forgot it. The detailed research however, took me ages, because I knew my readers would want to know that my detail was authentic, and true to events that happened during the war and after. For example. one of my characters is an American soldier and I read widely, searching actual accounts of events as they happened in the War. This was completely absorbing and took several years to complete, along with family commitments, work, and all the other parts of a busy woman's life. One is not just a writer of course, one has a life that carries on whether the book is going well or not.Like my characters in 'Crosswinds' I have been on a real journey - but one that I wouldn't have missed for the world.