Maxine developed Genuine Copy in 2017 in order to best play to her strengths: working with words and challenging conversations. A teenager during the nineties dot com boom she designed websites while revising for her GCSEs and did online journalism before she knew it had a name. She began her career writing about music, theatre and television – hampered by not being into drugs and being into earning a living wage – before moving into consumer journalism, social policy and the charity sector. She is interested in the emotional effects of dyspraxia and other neurological conditions, is a former trustee of the Dyspraxia Foundation, and a supporter of mental health charities including the National Suicide Prevention Alliance. Her first book, was supported by TLC and New Writing South in association with the Arts Council. In 2018 she was selected as one of 50 “rare minds” to attend RARE London at DD&D, an event for diversity in leadership in the creative industries. Maxine has a degree from Durham University and a PGDip in Journalism from Cardiff University.

The name is because a career counsellor at university told me I was ‘too genuine’ to go into journalism or PR. The lemon tea is because I’m Anglo-German.  Brits solve everything with a cup of tea, and Germans have it with lemon.

I was born in West London in 1984 to an East German mother and Dorset-born father who met in East Berlin. I spent my first year in the world being expected to die and have been stubborn in the face of adversity ever since. At 15, I hit upon journalism as the best way to channel curiosity, obsessive tendencies and a flair for writing and not much else into a career. I wrote my first profile piece at 17, which was a bad idea for lots of reasons but a learning experience in lots of ways. My non-media jobs have ranged from supporting language-impaired children to handling customer complaints for a tobacco firm. I have lived at six different addresses in the last ten years. I like political dramas (fictional and real), plain English, European history, Twitter, theatre, running, and music. I’m a passionate advocate for dyspraxia and mental health. I also blog elsewhere semi-anonymously about things that are too personal or too niche for the press. I spend a lot of time in London, on Twitter, thinking about my book and waiting for an occasion to visit the Donovan Bar. I frequently juggle listening to Radio 4 podcasts on foreign policy with watching 90s soaps on YouTube.