Author of the week: Ida Pollock

last updated 8 January 2015

For Ida Pollock, love is ageless, said Toni Jones in the Daily Mail (U.K.). At 105, the energetic Briton can confidently claim to be the world’s oldest working romance novelist, and though she now dictates her stories rather than typing them, she has no plans to stop. The Runaway, her 124th novel, is due out later this year. “I think I was born to write,” she says. “My mother would put a typewriter on the dining room table and say, ‘There you go.’” Pollock was 14 when she wrote her first novel, a thriller titled The Hills of Raven’s Haunt. She preferred writing mysteries as a teenager but says she switched to romance paperbacks “because my mother would always ask me to write ‘something pretty.’”

Pollock, who now writes as Marguerite Bell, admits to following a formula in much of her work, said Simon de Bruxelles in The Times (U.K.). “You need a grand, dramatic setting,” she says. “And a chance meeting—on a train, a cruise, or perhaps the hero and heroine find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island.” The men, she says, “are normally rich, but never vulgar with their money. Young men lack the maturity to take control, so an older man is essential to provide the reassurance the heroine needs.” Pollock says “there’s always turbulence” before the man sweeps in to save the day, but she’d object to her stories being called bodice-rippers. “My books are full of hope and romance rather than sex,” she says. “They are a form of escapism: You can escape the parts of the world that you don’t like.”