During a ten-year career as a singer, Susannah sang principal roles with many of the world's leading opera companies, including Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera, the Royal Opera, Santa Fe Opera, L.A. Opera, Seattle Opera, New York City Opera, the Canadian Opera Company, the Theatre du Chatelet and the Royal Swedish Opera at Drottningholm. During this time, and slotted in between having a daughter Isobel and a son Noah, she was invited by Samling  to give two different recitals of music and text with her husband Jonathan Cullen, and they fell in love with the whole set-up of the organisation.



In 2001, Susannah gave up singing to pursue her ambitions as a writer and director. The same year she was commissioned by the Covent Garden Festival to write and direct a series of monologues concerning the life of Elizabeth I. The resulting work, titled ‘the regina monologues’ premiered in May 2001 with Penelope Keith playing Elizabeth I, was immediately invited fur further performances in 2002 by festivals both in the UK and abroad. 2003 brought further performances of ‘the regina monologues’ at venues in the UK and abroad involving actresses Penelope Keith, Janet Suzman and Susannah York as well as the singer Felicity Palmer.



In 2003, Susannah launched her own company, The Paddock, committed to creating new work drawn from collaborations between established artists and ensembles in the fields of music, dance, visual arts, theatre and literature. Projects have include a production of nine-year old Daisy Ashford's novella ‘The Young Visitors’, a large scale site-specific community dance event called ‘Something to Dance About’, a new play about race, ‘Red All Over’, set in six rooms of a hotel, and a children’s outdoor touring show of Eleanor Farjeon’s ‘Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep’.



In July 2007, the Paddock will premiere a newly commissioned opera from the composer Orlando Gough, entitled The Finnish Prisoner.



Susannah’s first novel, ‘Long Gone Anybody’, was published by Black Swan in 2004, and her second, ‘Cold Comfort’, by Doubleday in February 2006. She is currently working on her third. She is an Associate Tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Sussex.