Deborah McDonald is the author of two biographies and is at present engaged in writing a third. She was born in north Kent, now better known as South London but did not stay there for long as her parents dragged her, at a young age, to live in Australia. She returned five years later , due to parental homesickness. Her father was a journalist and the writing bug must have been passed down to his daughter as she always had a pen in her hand and a yearning to learn.
However, in order to earn a crust, she went to work in Social Housing, which she quickly realised provided only a very small crust but was nonetheless rewarding. At the same time she completed a degree with the Open University, which she managed despite moves to Reading, Beaconsfield and Exeter during which time she also gained a husband and two children.
Once the degree was finished, she began to look for other ways to fill her writing and research void. The result was her first biography entitled ‘Clara Collet: An Educated Working Woman’. Collet was an early advocate of women’s rights who extended the boundaries of what were considered acceptable career choices for her sex. Deborah’s second book was ‘The Prince, His Tutor and the Ripper’, essentially a biography of JK Stephen and his relationship with Prince Eddy, both Ripper suspects.
She is now writing about Moura Budberg. This outrageous, charismatic, femme
fatale became the lover of British agent, Robert Bruce Lockhart, H G Wells and Maxim
Gorky. As a Russian she spied for her country but was never caught, unlike her sometime
drinking partner Guy Burgess, despite thirty years of investigation by MI5. Her
life became an invention of her own making and her friends and lovers all had different
versions. She is Nick Clegg’s great-
