Charlotte Popescu

CHARLOTTE POPESCU

Charlotte Popescu is the daughter of Christine Pullein-Thompson, famous author of pony books along with her sisters Diana and Josephine Pullein-Thompson. The three Pullein-Thompsons were daughters of Joanna Cannan, also a writer, who invented the genre of pony stories with A Pony for Jean.

Charlotte had an idyllic country childhood in Oxfordshire with ponies and bantams. Her father kept bees and there was an orchard and a large vegetable garden.

She read Classics at University and went on to work in the PR departments of a couple of large London publishers. She married, had three boys and now lives in Wiltshire.

Charlotte started her publishing business, Cavalier, by publishing the Pullein-Thompson pony stories. She also published a pony story by Joanna Cannan called Hamish. She then branched out and published a book called The Tears of War about her great aunt who was a First World War poet. This book was turned into a Radio 4 drama and starred James Purefoy as Bevil Quiller-Couch.

She then turned to writing a range of ‘good life’ type books, based on her past experiences and her current life. She lives the lifestyle that she writes about: she has kept hens in her garden for the last 15 years as family pets and has an ever increasing flock.  She also grows vegetables and fruit and is an experienced gatherer of wild food, aiming to be as self-sufficient as possible. She has written The Apple Cookbook and a series of fruity cookbooks. Her book Puddings – One for Every Day of the Year evolved after years of cooking puddings for a husband and three hungry boys.

Building on the success of her first chicken related book: Hens in the Garden, Eggs in the Kitchen (20,000 books now sold), Charlotte wrote Best Hens for You – Choosing Breeds for the Garden in which she explores which breeds will be most suitable for a family garden with stories to illustrate chickens and their characters.  She then wrote Chicken Runs and Vegetable Plots which is about how to combine growing veg and keeping chickens in the garden. Her new book Chickopidea which contains everything you could possibly want to discover about hens and cockerels is her latest title.