Jemma Forte grew up wanting to write for Cosmopolitan magazine, be a famous actress or work in a shoe shop (she loved the foot-measuring device in Clarks). Her parents didn’t want her to go to stage school because, according to them, she was ‘precocious enough already’. However, they actively encouraged her obsession with reading and writing and she wrote her first book, ‘Mizzy the Germ’, when she was eight. She sent it to a publisher (unwittingly backing up the whole precocious theory) ... Learn more