I had an unusual childhood in that I spent my childhood with my family sailing the world. My father, born in communist Romania, could not travel but dreamed of being a sailor. He met my English mother when she travelled behind the Iron Curtain but it was years before they were permitted to get married and my father could leave Romania and come to London. His dream became a reality and we spent seven years sailing around the world on a small yacht. I wrote about my experiences in my memoir Child of the Sea.

After returning to England, I went to comprehensives in Cornwall and Surrey, then completed a degree in International History from the LSE and studied for a year in Paris after finishing university. I also have a PGCE from the University of Gloucestershire.

I have published two non-fiction books, Child of the Sea (2012), and Our Ocean’s Broken Heart (2024), an account of my voyages to the Arctic and Pacific and the grave threats faced by the ocean due to climate change and human activity. In 1998 I won the London Arts Board Short Story competition with ‘Does the sun rise over Dagenham?’ which is still a set text on some university courses. I have been writing poetry and stories all my adult life. My articles have appeared in a range of publications online and in print. In 2023 I wrote the play High Wild Hills, a modern-day re-telling of the old story that Shakespeare spent his lost years in Dursley.

Much of my working life has been with the family business Cornell Sailing. For over thirty years we have organised international sailing events, and published best-selling reference books for sailors that are sold around the world. I have co-authored reference books with my father Jimmy, World Cruising Handbook (1990) and World Cruising Destinations (2017, 2022) published by Adlard Coles, Bloomsbury. I sailed across the Drake Passage to Antarctica in 1998 and in 2014 and 2015 helped organise the Blue Planet Odyssey round the world event, sailing myself to the Arctic and the Pacific, parts of the world most at threat from climate change. As part of the Blue Planet Odyssey I coordinated an environmental programme in partnership with UNESCO which saw sailors take part in citizen science projects, school links, and community work in some of the remotest parts of the world.

I have always been involved in political activism and community projects. I served as district councillor for my town of Dursley from 2012-2024 and from 2018-2022 was leader of Stroud District Council, the first ‘carbon neutral’ council in Europe, run by a cooperative alliance of Labour, Green and Liberal Democrats. I led the council through the pandemic, overseeing investment into community organisations, the local economy and environmental projects to reduce emissions across the district. I left the Labour Party in 2022 following the party’s leadership blocking my standing for selection for parliament, and served as an Independent councillor until the end of my term in 2024. I remain involved in environmental, community and political activism and have been chair of the GL11 Community Hub since 2020. I am a founding member of Dursley After Hours, bringing free live music to the town’s marketplace through the summer months.

No longer being an elected politician has given me time to return to my first love, writing, a journey which began in 1978 in the Solomon Islands when I wrote my first poems.

I have lived in Gloucestershire since 2000. I was married for 17 years to Czech dissident and philosopher Julius Tomin, with whom I have two children, and I now live with my partner, trade unionist and campaigning journalist Tim Lezard.