A mother-of-one with a long-held dream of becoming an author has signed a five-book deal with a major UK publisher.

The Comet: Tania Walsh has signed a five-book deal with a major publishing company.Tania Walsh has signed a five-book deal with a major publishing company. (Image: Archant)

A mother-of-one with a long-held dream of becoming an author has signed a five-book deal with a major UK publisher.

Tania Walsh, who has lived in Stevenage all her life, has always loved books and over the years has made various attempts at writing novels, most of which have remained unfinished.

In 2008, she was made redundant from her job in administration and decided it was time to focus on writing full-time.

The 32-year-old said: “I have always enjoyed writing, but always started something and never finished.

“I was made redundant in 2008 when the recession was really biting. If I wanted to write and make a career out of it, then was the time to do it. I made myself sit down and finish writing a book for once.”

Tania came up with the DCI Claire Winters crime novel series, full of suspense and gripping twists and turns.

She sent her manuscripts for the first two books off to agencies, only to be met with rejections, so she self-published the thrillers on Amazon in 2013.

Both have appeared in bestselling Amazon Kindle charts and have now been picked up by HarperCollins.

Tania has signed a five-book deal for the DCI Winters series, with the first, For All Our Sins, out earlier this month and set in a fictional city in Hertfordshire.

Tania has just finished writing the third DCI Winters book and is also currently working on a standalone novel about a family who are taken into witness protection.

Tania said; “Despite rejections and hard times I just kept going. This makes all the hard work worth it.

“It takes a long time to put together a complex crime novel. I try to work everyday but some days it can be a complete slog and I’m staring at a blank page. Another day I could be flying and writing thousands of words.

“The key thing is to have stamina. A 100,000 word novel isn’t going to write itself, but writing is a compulsion.”