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About



Adele Cosgrove-Bray is a writer and artist based in Wirral, England. 

Her writing has been published traditionally in magazines and anthologies, and she has also explored self-publishing. Her Artisan-Sorcerer novels, which follow the lives of artistic members of an occult order, have drawn an impressive cult following. 

She has worked as an editor, a health promotion officer, a library assistant at Liverpool City Libraries, a photographer, a tarot card reader, and as a potter and tour guide for Pretty Ugly Pottery, and since 2010 she has been an Activity Co-ordinator in the care sector, working with vulnerable people who live with dementia and other mental health issues.

Her paintings can be viewed on here or on her YouTube site, where you can also hear her reading aloud some of her stories.




Adele on her beloved swing, in the garden at Newton-le-Willows.

Adele was born in Knutsford, Cheshire, but her parents soon moved to Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire. Eight years later the family moved again, this time to Lowton in Lancashire.

Adele was a quiet child who could read before she started infant school. She spent hours dressing her cats in baby clothes and pushing them round the garden in a toy pram. With her sister, she created countless RPG stories and cherished around a million paper dolls.


Hazel, Agnes Bray and Adele on holiday at Skegness.

On her thirteenth birthday, Adele announced that she was going to be a rock singer.  With two school pals, she formed a band. Between them they owned a kazoo and two guitars, one of which had a broken neck. This mercifully short-lived project evolved into a love of writing poetry. Adele was just seventeen when Pipes of Pan became the first magazine to publish one of her poems. Between 1987 and 1989, aged twenty-three, Adele wrote a dream interpretation column for Your Future magazine (previously named Exploring the Supernatural) under the pseudonym Niamh Koo.


The life studio at Clarence Street, Liverpool.

In her mid-twenties, Adele studied fine art painting at the City of Liverpool College, whose art department was then sited on Clarence Street. Later, she also studied pottery at the Riversdale Campus in Liverpool.

Adele has worked as a tarot card reader, a potter and a tour guide for Pretty Ugly Pottery, a library assistant, a health promotion officer, a freelance writer, and an activity co-ordinator in the care sector.

She has lived in various suburbs of Liverpool, including Aigburth, the home of her fictional Artisan-Sorcerers.  She moved to West Kirby on the Wirral peninsula in 2000, and chaired meetings for Riverside Writers from 2003 to 2015. She currently lives in Oxton, Wirral, and shares life with husband Richard and their dogs.


Adele, in 2021.

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