My Favourite Holiday: Author Elizabeth Fremantle found a lost paradise in Moroccan hideaway

ELIZABETH FREMANTLE, 54, is the author of a number of hugely-popular novels set in the Elizabethan era.

The Girl In The Glass Tower (Michael Joseph paperback, £7.99) is her latest acclaimed book. It’s a claustrophobic political thriller set in the run-up to Elizabeth I’s death.

Elizabeth, who has two grown-up children with her French ex-husband, lives in London.

AS a kid, I hardly ever had holidays.

My parents split when I was young and I tended to spend non-school time at my mum’s place back on Exmoor.

It was a really beautiful place, a house on a hill, but it was so isolated I hated it as a teenager.

I think I’d love it now as a place to write.

One of my favourite places is in southern Morocco, a little place called Taroudant. It’s about 40 minutes from the busy resort of Agadir but it couldn’t be more different.

It’s a hidden paradise that seems like it hasn’t changed from the 1930s. In the evenings, songbirds fill the trees.

I’m a bit of a creature of habit and until a couple of years back I went to Ibiza every summer for about 15 years.

I’m not at all into the craziness but there are hundreds of beaches and you can always find a quiet bay.

I often stayed with friends – in their treehouse. You really feel like part of nature and the gentle sway and creek of the tree is a lovely thing to send you to sleep.

Mind you, when it was windy I didn’t fancy it so much!

For the past couple of years I’ve taken to exploring all that the British seaside has to offer, just staying in Airbnb properties.

Last summer I went Kingsdown, which is just south of Deal in Kent.

It seemed to me like the town that time forgot.

It must have been like a little fishing village at one point and there are two or three rows of cottages right on the beach.

You can see all the ships going past and the ferries going back and forth to Dover.

I find being by the sea so inspiring work-wise so I’ve already booked this year’s break, a couple of weeks in Thorpeness on the Suffolk coast.

It’s a peculiar little place – a bit like Portmeirion, which featured in The Prisoner – but so charming and I’m really looking forward to it.