From my first trip to Paris as a fourteen year old I knew that I wanted to travel. South Africa was next and then the Kingdom in the Sky - Lesotho. I returned to England thirty years later but after only a brief pause, moved on to America, and then finally to southern France.

At the age of nineteen, Kate Fagalde emigrated from England to South Africa, much against the wishes of her parents. Telling them that she would only be gone for a while, she proceeded to spend the next thirty years living first in Lesotho where her husband ran a number of trading stations, and then later on in South Africa where she and her second husband rebuilt a derelict farm.

Having sold their farm in the late 1990’s, Kate and her French husband Jean moved to England where they stayed for three years, trying to cope with indifferent weather and mainly indifferent people. Accepting an offer to work in America, they relocated to Miami and spent the next five years dodging hurricanes and experiencing life in America.  During this time, Kate was invited to lecture aboard the QE2 and her sister ship Caronia, and returned twice to Africa, and also visited Panama, Peru and Chile.

Both Kate’s children and five grandchildren live in Melbourne Australia, which provided a good excuse to take a look “Down Under” and with a brother in Canada, that meant another destination to be explored.
 
But life in Florida was clearly not the long term solution, and after five years, Kate and Jean decided that it was time to return to their European roots. They are now living in an old village house in the south of France within easy reach of Montpellier, where they are once again discovering the joy of having a back door which leads out into a garden and not onto a seventeenth floor balcony.

Kate has been writing from the time that she won a school essay competition at the age of fifteen. Her book “Lambs Love and Laughter” which described their life on the farm was originally self-published in England and was serialised in the South African Country Life Magazine over a period of twelve months. She has had work published in the English Saga Magazine and while in Florida, she wrote a regular column for an English newspaper entitled “From Midhurst to Miami”.

Kate now keeps a daily diary of their new life in France, and has packed the suitcases firmly at the back of the garage.  

Her recently completed novel “On Which The Sun Has Set”  is a culmination of experience, research and the twenty three years that she spent living in Mohales Hoek.  In addition to the novel, she has written an autobiographical account of her years in Africa entitled “From Cannibals to Croissants”.

Her latest novel “Angels in the Attic” is completed and is set in England during modern times and in France during the second World War.  She is currently working on a screenplay of her African novel.