Susan Elkin

Susan Elkin is a journalist, critic, author and former teacher of secondary English.

Born in Oxford, she grew up in South London, lived in Kent for many years but is now, very happily, back in South London. She married Nicholas Elkin, a local lad, in 1969. When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2017 he gave her permission to blog about his illness. Those blogs - posted weekly for 28 months until his death - are what forms Susan's book The Alzheimer's Diaries published in November 2022.

Susan trained as a teacher at Bishop Otter College, now part of the University of Chichester. Later she did a degree - arts and English Literature - with the Open University and achieved First Class Honours. She also has an MA Lit (Open University) in 19th century poetry.

Around 1990, having taught for over 20 years, Susan began to moonlight as a journalist and writer and soon gave up  her senior management post and went part time to accommodate her new career - finally leaving teaching in 2004. 

She has written extensively for most of the national dailies including The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and The Sunday Times. She wrote the Education Notebook column in  Daily Mail for 11 years and was eduction editor at The Stage from 2005 to 2016. She has also written for a wide magazines from The Woodworker to Cat World and from She to Kent Life. Today she concentrates on arts magazines and websites - publishing an average of 25 items a month including her own blog Susan's Bookshelves.

Susan's Bookshelves led directly to All Booked Up, an autobiographical reflection on a lifetime of reading, published by the Book Guild in 2024.

Susan also has many books to her name including Please Miss We're Boys, a teaching memoir published by The Book Guild in 2019. She has written around 30 text books and English Literature study guides, now published by Hodder Education, how-to books for teachers, a careers book for students and a biography of an arts and crafts woodworker - among other things.

She has two sons, four granddaughters and a tabby and white cat named Dave.