Mary Monro
Mary lives in Edinburgh and practises as a Registered Osteopath, treating people and animals. She was formerly a marketing strategy consultant and began her career with Cadbury’s confectionery. She was born and raised at a farm on the edge of the Shropshire hills.
She spoke about her great aunt, Dora Metcalf, at The National Museum of Computing, the British Society for the History of Mathematics conference in 2021, and at the Women’s History Association of Ireland‘s conference in 2025. Mary contributed to an anthology of Scottish Women’s writing, Lucent (8D Press 2021), in which she wrote about her journey to visit Dora’s home at Loch Morar. Various blogs have hosted posts about Dora and she now has her own Wikipedia page. Mary was awarded Highly Commended in the Society of Women Writers & Journalists Biography competition in 2024.
Stranger In My Heart (Unbound 2018) was Mary’s first book, a memoir/biography about her father’s heroics in the Far East in the Second World War. It received coverage in the UK national press, various magazines and in the South China Morning Post. In February 2019 it was number 2 bestseller on Amazon UK in the “Second World War Biographies” category. Mary had a 20 minute interview on China Radio International, spoke about her book at the Bristol Literature Festival and Shrewsbury Literature Festival in 2018 and has spoken to numerous groups such as Women’s Institutes, the Researching Far East POW History Group conference and the Military Museum Scotland. In August 2021 she was interviewed about Stranger In My Heart on the BBCR4 show Saturday Live.
A Bitter Equation 