Biography

Back

Wendy Bardsley, PGCE, B.Ed.(Hons) M.Phil.
Poet, Writer, Author - Fact & Fiction

Wendy Bardsley has lived in the Peak District most of her life and is a keen hill walker. She has three grown children from her marriage to William Bardsley, Reader in Biochemistry at Manchester University, where she has worked as a freelance lecturer in Educational Professional Development. Wendy has taught widely in schools and colleges and has worked in The Manchester Inspection and Advisory Service as an advisory teacher for English, Drama, Cross Curricular Activities and Special Needs, at one time creating a whole curriculum for a school for children with blindness and visual impairment in Manchester. She was also responsible for matters concerning The United Nations Convention for The Rights of the Child, which came into force in England in 1992 and has been heard on radio both at home and abroad. She has organised and delivered international conferences and worked intermittently as a writer with The University Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester on an outreach scheme bringing together students from a variety of schools to work collectively on poetry, and has also served on the Arts Committee of The Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society where she delivered a lecture on Branwell Bronte to a large and varied audience. Her talk featured in their Manchester Memoirs, volume 143, 2004-2005 Special Dalton Edition.

Wendy is a non-fiction author with Longman Books and HarperCollins, a published poet and novelist, and was a Literary Reviewer for The Independent on Sunday for a while. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies and in March 2017, Methuen Publishing published the third edition of her novel, Branwell Bronte’s Creation, and have now published The Passions of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth: A Conflict of Love, with a further novel, The Troubled Mind of Mary Shelley to be published in March 2021.

A biographer and anthologist she is editor of An Enduring Flame; the Bronte Story in poetry and photographs containing poems from famous and well-known poets around the world inspired by the Bronte story. The book features a vast number of photographs by the well-known photographer Simon Warner. Another anthology she edited is Poetry in the Parks: A celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Parks of England and Wales in Poems and Photographs with a Foreword by Alan Howarth, CBE MP, Minister for the Arts, and introduced by Ewan Cameron, Chairman of The Countryside Agency. Her debut novel, The Other Concerto, was greeted with acclaim and gained a Star The Bookseller, May 2002, after which Methuen published Branwell Bronte’s Creation, a novel about the Bronte brother. She is at present working on something else, as yet to be revealed.