Fran Bigman majored in history at Brown University in Rhode Island and then spent two years on the JET programme in Tottori City teaching senior high-school students.

Fran has taught EFL to adults at Fluency in English, a school in Cambridge and tutored many students privately both in Japan and the US.  She has a MPhil in English from Cambridge and is starting her PhD there in October 2010.

Her hobbies include swimming, watching films from the 1940s, and cooking Indian food, and she is the oldest of seven children.