In these books, she focused on the prejudices children in Northern Ireland grew up with – and how they didn’t have to carry these prejudices into their adult lives. She wrote five more adult novels before turning her attention to fiction for children. Lingard’s first novel, Liam’s Daughter, was published in 1963. She taught in primary schools in and around Edinburgh for the next 10 years while also writing whenever she could while her three daughters, who she had with her first husband, Frederick England, played in the garden. In 1950, she enrolled at Moray House (now part of the University of Edinburgh) to train to be a teacher, graduating in 1953. She left school at 16 following the death of her mother from breast cancer and got a job working in a primary school before returning to Edinburgh to join her father.

Her novel, The File on Fraulien Berg, was based on her experiences at Bloomfield and the school acknowledged her presence there by naming its library after her. She won a scholarship to Bloomfield Collegiate School, the local girls’ grammar school where she made lifelong friends. Joan Lingard's last novel for children was published in 2014, when she was 82 years old. Her mother encouraged her to write her own books and at the age of 11, she did just that and realised then that she wanted to be a novelist. A keen reader from a young age, she quickly exhausted most of the books in her local library and requested books as presents for birthdays and at Christmas. She moved to live in East Belfast with her family when she was two. Her father was an accounts checker and chief yeoman of signals in the Royal Navy. Lingard was born in the back of a taxi on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, the daughter of Elizabeth (nee Beattie) and Henry Lingard.

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