"It's Minx, Petra Minx."
Marion Leigh was born and educated in Birmingham, England, where she attended a school for high achievers. She went on to study Modern Languages (French and German) at Oxford University. Following a brief stint with a merchant bank, she spent a year as a volunteer teaching English to adults in Bandung, Indonesia. There she was lucky enough to be befriended by a local family who co-opted her as a model for batik dresses.
Back in the UK, central London claimed her for a while. Then it was off to Canada, where Marion taught French to recalcitrant teenagers before turning to translation. After a decade with an international accounting firm where she honed her skills as a financial and legal translator, she set up her own company that specialized in the translation of corporate annual reports.
Over twenty-five Canadian winters later, with a successful career in translation behind her, it was time for Marion to move to warmer climes and put the creative part of her brain to the test.
‘I wanted to fulfill an ambition that had been in my thoughts since I began penning poetry in my teens: to write a full-length novel,’ she says. ‘My idea was to create a series of adventure thrillers featuring Marine Unit Sergeant Petra Minx of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, drawing on my travel experiences by land and sea.
The first Petra Minx novel, The Politician’s Daughter, was set in Spain and Morocco and came out in 2011. Petra’s second adventure, Dead Man’s Legacy, takes her to the Bahamas, Las Vegas and the Great Lakes of North America, and was published in 2015. I’m working on the third book in the series which will see Petra on safari in South Africa, among other things.’
Marion loves reading, writing, music (piano, harp and Tina Turner), keeping fit through walking and Pilates, travel and, above all, boating. To date, she has explored the five Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence Seaway and the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, including the Magdalen Islands and Newfoundland. Next on the list is the Caribbean.