Anne Coates was our September speaker. She has been a freelance journalist for the last 20 years, after working as Assistant Fiction Editor at Woman’s Weekly and Woman and Home. She has contributed to the national press including The Guardian, The Scotsman, Mirror and News of the World plus a wide range of magazines from Bella and Candis to Practical Parenting and Prima Baby. She writes on a variety of subjects but specialises in health and parenting.

Anne has also worked on and edited in-house magazines, including one for Shell UK, and customer/client publications. Currently she edits Health and Homeopathy for the BHA. Her fiction experience has been put to good use - writing short stories (Bella, Candis among others) and abridging books for Reader’s Digest and Orion Compact Classics. There’s always a “novel-in-progress” but most often these are on the back burner. However she has published three non-fiction titles: Women and Sport and Teenscene Pregnancy (both Wayland) and Your Only Child (Bloomsbury).

This year the internet beckoned and Anne has launched a website – www.parentingwithouttears.com - which incorporates her journalism and experience she has gained as a parent (one daughter hence the book!), chairing the management committee of a community nursery, being chair of governors at a primary school and being part of a child protection working party. For the last 15 years she has run French classes for primary school-aged children. All this has given her contact with a wide range of families and insight into the sort of dilemmas and problems parents are sometimes faced with – hence Parenting Without Tears!