Like many children of the Sixties, my dream was to be an astronaut. Sadly, this proved impracticable, so I wrote stories instead. Having chosen Historical Fiction as my main genre, I can live vicariously in pre-history; Anglo-Saxon, Dark Age and 17th Century Britain; 19th Century Tasmania, or wherever and whenever else I choose, travelling in time and space without personal risk to life and limb.
(My fictional characters are not so lucky).
Horses, geology, history and a love of travelling have meant a varied career: I’ve worked as a groom; researched sea-level changes on the north-east coast of England; discovered a mysterious 14/15th Century cremation site in Northern Ireland; and lived for a year in a campervan in Tasmania, following a story. As a result of these experiences, combined with a profound love of the natural world, a recurring theme in my work is the interplay of historical events, landscape and mythology. Researching my books has led me to the far north and west of Scotland; the Fens of East Anglia and the South West Wilderness in Tasmania. I’ve also taken the Viking sea-road to the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, (though in considerably more comfort than Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson!). One day I hope to follow Leif to Vinland.
I’m a now a full time writer, currently living in England though I am also Australian.
I enjoy writing short stories as well as novels and am a past winner of the Barclays Bank Essay competition (for a short story called ‘The Cormorant’). I also won the ‘Wings over the Cloud’ award for ‘The First Flight of Hermogenes Smith‘, a story inspired by the tragic death of my hang-gliding instructor, in the early 1980’s. More recently, ‘Ice Bear’, about an old man abandoned in Viking Age Greenland, was shortlisted for the HNS 2016 Short Story Award and included in the anthology ‘Distant Echoes’. ‘Dinosaur’ a story set in the present (despite the title), was shortlisted for the Creative Writing Ink Short Story Prize in 2023.
For many reasons, I’m not a big user of social media. But you can find me on Goodreads and I’m in the ALLi Author Member Directory here.
At present many of my books are available in print via major online bookstores (including Blackwell’s and Waterstones in the U.K.; B&N in the U.S., and Amazon globally). Or please support your local bookseller by ordering through them.
Digital editions of these books (and more), are available via Amazon Kindle (KDP) and Kobo.
The earth turns, tides ebb and flow . . .