Sue Thomas (born 1951) is an English author. Writing since the late 1980s, she has used both fiction and nonfiction to explore the impact of computers and the internet on everyday life. In recent years her work has focused on the connections between life, nature and technology. Biography Sue Thomas was born in Rearsby, a small village in Leicestershire, England, where her maternal grandparents owned a rose-growing business. Her parents were both Dutch: her mother, Dora had been brought to the UK as a small child, whilst her father, Wim, grew up in The Netherlands and emigrated to England to marry her mother in 1950. The de Vos family was very active in the Dutch Resistance during World War II, and Wim later wrote an account of his teenage years under German Occupation. The three children. Susan, Stephen and Carolyn, were often culturally adrift, caught between two different nationalities – their Dutch heritage and English homeland. Their parents made little attempt to teach them the language but they heard Dutch spoken around them all the time. Sue once wrote that she grew up ‘feeling like a foreigner in my own family’. During the 1950s and 60s, their father had a series of jobs selling office furniture, photocopiers, articulated lorries and, once, a revolutionary chicken feed system. This meant that the de Vos family frequently moved houses and schools – from Leicestershire to Newcastle, then Corby, Epsom, and finally Nottingham, where Wim at last found his metier as a life underwriter. After five years of disrupted secondary education, Sue left school at 16 and pursued her own equally varied career as accounts clerk, life model, fine art student, bookseller, and self-taught machine-knitter. She married Tyrone Thomas in 1974, had two daughters, Amber b.1976) and Erin (b.1979), and divorced in 1984. In 1985 she enrolled as a mature student to study for a BA Hons in English and History. After graduation, she spent several years working freelance and teaching creative writing in a wide range of communities from schools and libraries to a high security prison, eventually joining Nottingham Trent University as an English lecturer. Her first novel, ‘Correspondence’, was published in 1992. Her unsettled and diverse early life seemed to have positioned her for an outsider adulthood in the margins, so she was surprised to find that her resulting maverick qualities made her attractive to new universities and other institutions looking