About

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, celebrating local history and landscape, and helping with The Greenwood Tree, the quarterly magazine of the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society.

I am publicist for the annual The Bridport Literary Festival.

An avid reader, I review books for NetGalley and The Historical Novel Society.

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.