FLEUR DE LYS PUBLISHING

Jude Calvert-Toulmin is the great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Stanislaw August Poniatowski who was The Last King of Poland. A controversial leader who accomplished much in culture and education, and who once moved parliament to tears with one of his speeches, he died in St. Petersburg, a virtual prisoner and deeply in debt, on 12 February 1798.

Jude is also a grandmother. But prior to that...

Jude Calvert-Toulmin started a diary at the age of thirteen and never stopped writing. Having left her hometown of Sheffield, in 1981 she graduated with an honours degree in Film & TV Production from Manchester Polytechnic. She then moved to London, where at the turn of the 80s she worked as a freelance photo-journalist for the music press. Her work was first published in i-D magazine, followed by articles in Melody Maker and indy music rag Masterbag. She had two top ten songs written about her by jilted pop stars.

She was wined and dined by international playboys and corporate chiefs whilst working as a geisha girl in an exclusive Japanese nightclub in Mayfair (without sleeping with any of them), she was a busker at the top of the Bakerloo Line escalators on the London Underground and travelled in Europe, learning Spanish, French and Swedish in the process.

Jude also acted in several films, starring in Sheffield/L.A. film director Peter Care's first film, the influential cult short Johnny Yesno, which went on to be one of the influences behind David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Jude also acted in various Royal College of Art student films by directors such as Phil Shotton, who went on to direct many of the Happy Mondays videos and was the co-originator of the word Madchester.

In 1995 Jude formed a band, Venus Tree, but despite growing attention from the Sheffield music press, gave it up once she was due to give birth to her third baby; one's babies are far more important than one's career, after all.

Once her children were all in school, Jude started writing for publication again, this time for the climbing press, having articles published in the climbing magazines On The Edge and High Mountain.

Her last piece, Tits vs Homo-Eroticism, which is more acceptable at the crag? created a storm of controversy on the British climbing forums, attracting 30 separate threads and over 100,000 words written about the author and her light-hearted piss take of a 700 word article.

In 2004 Jude took a crew to Chamonix, France, to shoot footage for a documentary "The Search For Blake Hartley", accompanying a mother on her search for her army cadet son who went missing on his first night of a climbing training expedition. He disappeared not in the mountains though, but after a night out in Chamonix town centre. The documentary is still to be completed, but now is not the time.

In 2005 Jude became a full time writer and started writing MY ADVENTURES IN CYBERSPACE, the first novel in a trilogy set in Sheffield and inspired by her own experience of falling in love on the internet merely by dint of someone's writing.

In the spring of 2008 Jude wrote Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law under the pen name Julia, and in August 2008 founded Fleur De Lys Publishing.

In February 2012 Jude became a best-selling author of erotic fiction when her novel Mother-in-Law Son-in-Law went into the top 100 in both book and Kindle in the Amazon Erotica charts.

In February 2012 Jude won the popular prime time TV show Come Dine With Me.

Jude lives in Sheffield with her fiance and editor Brian Trevelyan, with whom she fell in love on the internet in 2001, and their five cats - Frank Zappa, Mojo, Little Girl Lizzie, Growler and Travis.

Jude's Facebook fan page is at facebook.com/judecalverttoulmin

"For me, writing is not some whim, it is a passion that has taken a lifetime to come to fruition, after a journey which has encompassed one grandson, two divorces, three children and, I hope, writing and publishing many more books. The fact that I have set up a publishing house to facilitate the delivery of my writing to my readers reflects my passion, and I hope my passion will be transferred to you through my books."