About Maddie Grigg

Welcome to my website. Thanks for dropping by.

I’m Margery Hookings and I write about English country life in the village I call Lush Places, in the western corner of Dorset. Sometimes, on my blog, I rant or reflect on current news stories, post book reviews and tell stories from faraway places.

Under the pen name of Maddie Grigg, I write a weekly column for The People’s Friend, the world’s longest-running magazine for women. It’s about English life in the Dorset village I call Lush Places, named after William Boot’s nature column in The Daily Beast from the Evelyn Waugh novel, Scoop. I also write about the time I spend in rural France.

Blogging has been part of my life on and off since 2007, through the award-winning The World From My Window and a pandemic blog, And The People Stayed Home. The People’s Friend found me online in 2015 when the editorial team was looking for a columnist. I’ve been writing for the magazine ever since.

Born and brought up on a small farm in south Somerset, I trained as a journalist with Mirror Group Newspapers in Devon.

I was editor of The Bridport and Lyme Regis News from 1999-2004 and worked in public relations for a housing association and a primary care trust. I now work freelance and have written and published a few books. My work includes community heritage projects for Windrose Rural Media Trust, celebrating local history and landscape, and helping with The Greenwood Tree, the quarterly magazine of the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society.

I was publicist for the annual The Bridport Literary Festival for many years and review pre-publication books for NetGalley.

You can find me on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and also Goodreads. I came off the plaform formerly known as Twitter in the summer of 2024 because I dislike the way it has developed and been weaponised.

If you’d like to get in touch, please email maddie.grigg@yahoo.co.uk

Ancient landscapes – the stories within them and human connections over time – matter to me immensely.