Precocious, forthright and a defiant individualist, Elizabeth McCullough was born in Derry in 1928 just as her parents were agreeing a less than amicable separation. Even as a small child she rebelled against the conventions of middle-class society and was never afraid to voice her opinions, leading her headmistress to label her a 'bad mixer'.

After her disastrous first marriage to a German refugee twenty years her senior ended, she sailed to Africa in 1960 to join the man who would become her second husband. Undaunted by the challenges she faced there, she went on to raise three children in Ghana and then Tanzania, and enjoyed a happy family life until a protracted battle with alcohol addiction threatened to destroy everything.

Brilliantly written and searingly honest, Eighty Not Out is the compelling memoir of an unconventional woman and an unconventional life.

Auteur

Think Diana Athill, Sheila Hancock, Lynne Barber, Karen Blixen, add a stiff shot of vodka and shake well. Elizabeth McCullough was born in Derry in 1928 and grew up on the outskirts of Belfast. She ran the photographic department of Queen's University Belfast for five years, before leaving Northern Ireland in 1960 to join her husband-to-be – a parasitologist with the World Health Organisation – in Africa, where they lived for the next fifteen years.

She is the author of a number of books including A Square Peg: An Ulster Childhood and Late Developer: A Greenhorn in Ghana 1960–65. She now lives in North Berwick, Scotland. 