Bio.

Biography

Childhood Photo
Ellie the Style Icon

Ellie was born at the tail end of the eighties in Newtownards, Northern Ireland. She grew up in Bangor, Northern Ireland, with a brother, a sister, and a Yorkshire Terrier called Scamp. Scamp was grumpy and never liked her.

At eighteen, Ellie left Bangor for the bright lights of Lincoln, England, where she spent three years failing a degree in Criminology and Forensic Science.

At twenty-one, Ellie moved back to Bangor and, at twenty-two, she moved back to England for six months to be a ‘Ministry Support Worker‘ for a church in Oxford. The role involved regularly moving a lot of chairs and a respectable amount of Youth Work.

Recent calculations indicate that – between the six months in Oxford, several years helping with kids work at events such as Spring Harvest, doing office work for Abaana, giving her time to the Youth Justice AgencyInvisible Traffick, and Fighting Words Belfast – Ellie has clocked up somewhere in the region of one thousand voluntary hours.

Paid work over the years have included a newspaper round, time in a call centre, being a shop assistant (at Christmas, no less!), telling people where to park at the Lincolnshire Agricultural Show, and asking people on the street to answer questionnaires about their drug and alcohol usage (that went about as well as you can imagine).

Ellie at the Youth Justice Agency Volunteer Awards
Ellie at the Youth Justice Agency Volunteer Awards, 2015. Photo by Aaron McCracken/Harrisons

These days, Ellie lives in Belfast with her husband (Steve), accidental chihuahua (Giles), and two cats (Gizmo and Grogu). Any time not spent caring for them goes into writing (poetry, fan fiction, flash fiction, short stories, scripts, novels, blog posts, Twitter statuses) and art (drawing, painting, making a mess).