Biography

My folks come from Texas - real live cowboys and dirt farmers from way back. I’m the only child of two loving, intelligent artists, Ann and Don Nix, who migrated to Washington DC because it was a better spot for their art careers than Dallas - which is big on big hair but not much on art!

I grew up in Virginia and majored in humanities at University of Virgina, mostly because they offered me an all-expenses paid scholarship. But halfway through my college career, the whole family caught the California bug and we all ran away from home together. My parents ended up in the wine country town of Sonoma and I finished up my university education at UC Berkeley, working on the school newspaper, the Daily Californian, and creating and editing a tiny magazine.

Five days after I graduated from Berkeley, I send my Daily Californian clips to the San Francisco Chronicle’s intern program, and glory be! They accepted me as an intern. One of my very first stories was to sneak in undercover (posing as a bimbo, natch…) to Hugh Hefner’s wedding. The story got picked up by the national wires, and I got hired as a full - time reporter at the age of twenty-two.

During my five fruitful and productive yards at the Chronicle I learned to write under pressure and meet deadlines, got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, went undercover with the Moonies, and spent a month posing as a high school senior, to write a front page series on the dreadful state of public schools in California. This story caused a huge fuss, and ended up as the basis for the movie - Never Been Kissed, with Drew Barrymore. (The movie’s rubbish - trust me, it was nothing like that!)

When I was twenty-six, I started a novel about my family in Texas, called Wildcatting. Doubleday bought the first one hundred pages of the novel for an amount which was, at the time, the largest amount of money ever paid for an unfinished first novel. Wildcatting went on to be number one on the Italian best seller list in 1993. Why Italian? Dunno…guess the Italians like their cowboy stories!

At that time KGO Newstalk 810, the number one radio station in the Bay Area, was looking to put more women on the air. The dynamic and charming executive producer, Robin Bertolucci, spoke to me on the phone and decided that she liked my attitude and the sound of my voice. She lured me into giving radio a try (but I don’t know anything about broadcasting! I said. Never mind, she said…) I tried it once, and was hooked. I worked for a while doing fill-in slots, and then came a tragic and fateful day - the much beloved talkshow host Duane Garrett took his life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Robin called me that same afternoon and asked me to fill in. A few weeks later, they hired me full time, and the Shann Nix Show was born.

I worked at KGO for ten years, speaking nightly to over a million listeners. We talked politics, events of the day, controversy…whatever was on the front page that day. When my daughter Joli was born, I moved the show to weekends so that I could take care of her full-time.

There’s nothing quite like doing live radio debate - I used to say that it was like surfing naked down the freeway in Friday rush hour traffic - completely dangerous and totally exposed. Anything can happen on live radio, and it usually does! My boss used to say, -Your job is to dance on the high wire, and make me feel like you’re always about to fall off. If you actually fall off, I’ll fire you. And I can’t tell you where the edge is..

In March 2003, I met a British man who came to Sonoma on vacation. He asked me to come with him to England and marry him, and I accepted. Together we moved to Wales, to a farm. Turned out in the end I liked the place a lot better than the man - so when we split, five years later, I decided to stay on in Wales on my own.

With Joli, 8 and Benjamin, 2, I moved into a little stone cottage on the top of a windswept hill, with long views of the Preseli mountains. We lived there for a year and a half. Then one day I met Rich, a Welsh harp maker who lived on a farm by the sea with his two beautiful daughters, Ceris, 17 and Elly,16, and Rich’s father, Taid. 

After a brief but thorough courtship, Rich swept us off to live on his beautiful farm, where we raise our own lambs, mows our own hay and grow vegetables in a polytunnel. Suddenly, I went from being a single mother to presiding over a supper table for ten!

Let the adventures begin…