The de Vos family was very active in the Dutch Resistance during World War II, and Wim later wrote an account of his teenage years under the German occupation of the Netherlands.

[citation needed] During the 1950s and the 1960s, their father had a series of jobs, selling office furniture, photocopiers, articulated lorries and, once, a revolutionary chicken feed system.

This meant that the de Vos family frequently moved houses and schools – from Leicestershire to Newcastle, then Corby, Epsom, and finally Nottingham, where Wim at last found his metier as a life underwriter.

[citation needed] After five years of disrupted secondary education, Sue left school at 16 and pursued her own equally varied career as accounts clerk, life model, fine art student, bookseller, and self-taught machine-knitter.

[citation needed] After graduation, she spent several years working freelance and teaching creative writing in a wide range of communities from schools and libraries to a high security prison, eventually joining Nottingham Trent University as an English lecturer.

[citation needed] Her unsettled and diverse early life seemed to have positioned her for an outsider adulthood in the margins, so she was surprised to find that her resulting maverick qualities made her attractive to new universities and other institutions looking for a fresh approach.

[5] In 1997, she was awarded a substantial Arts Council Grant to set up the trAce Online Writing Community, a ground-breaking internet organisation connecting writers around the world.

She also led the development of the concept of transliteracy, "the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks".

In 2009 she was awarded a British Academy grant to spend several months at the University of California Santa Barbara where she undertook the research into the connections between nature and cyberspace which would lead to the development of her theory of technobiophilia.