[6] In 2024, her novel The Wedding Dress Repair Shop won the RoNA Award for Popular Fiction.

Her secondary school English teacher, Miss White, encouraged her writing and arranged for her to learn to touch type, which proved increasingly invaluable over the years as her vision has steadily deteriorated.

[11][12] Before turning to writing full time, she held a wide variety of part-time jobs, including working for a lead light maker and as a plumber.

When one of her satires (My Place in the Country, later re-written as Good Husband Material 2000) was shortlisted for The Constable Trophy for Northern Writers in the 1980s, she began, with the encouragement of her agent, Judith Murdoch, to move towards romantic comedy.

The Trisha Ashley Award[15] (TAA) was set up to encourage new writers and is an annual prize for a short story, in conjunction with Creative Writing Matters.