I am a writer of novels, short stories and children’s stories.

I was born and brought up in Southampton, on the sunny side of the southern English coast.  Then modern languages took me to university in Oxford and to a range of brief jobs in Germany and France, working in quality control in an electronics factory in Stuttgart or labouring on a farm in Aveyron making Roquefort cheese.  All that time, I read - English of course, and 19th century German and French literature, since that was what I was supposed to be studying. 

And at the end of all this?  I graduated in the mid 1980s into - what else at that time? - the financial sector.  Big Bang, Black Wednesday, the birth of the derivative.  I watched all this from a junior seat in the sidelines, but in the course of my banking career I lent money to diamond businesses in London’s Hatton Garden, to restaurants in Leicester, and to a gold mine in Zimbabwe.  At least some of these paid the money back too.

By accident rather than design, for most of the time since my children were born, we have lived outside Britain, first in Zimbabwe and now in Luxembourg. I made up stories for the children when they were little and moved on to writing novels when the children stopped listening to the stories... Writing became more and more a compulsion, but for as long as I can remember, I had to find time in the spaces available between paid work and family life.  But there would come a day...

And now... the children have left home (except, strangely, during Covid lockdowns) and I started part-time working in 2020. So definitely more time for writing.