A little bit more about me...

I was born in Nottingham, England and went to High Pavement Grammar School (motto: Virtus Sola Nobilitas - Virtue is the only nobility). My English teacher in Classical 3 was 1974 Booker prizewinner Stanley Middleton. Unfortunately, the school took issue with my poor attendance and we parted company. I was fifteen. (Although it's irrelevant, High Pavement was also the school attended by Dr Harold Shipman, the prolific serial killer. He started the year I left. My late brother-in-law, Eric Harris, was Shipman's sportsmaster.)

After umpteen jobs - factory worker, van boy for a laundry, trainee electrical engineer at a tobacco firm, under-manager in a hosiery factory, door-to-door saleman, bus conductor, accounts clerk - I landed on my feet. At the age of twenty-three, I was working for a finance company when it decided to install its first computer. I was selected to become a computer programmer. Thus began a career that took me to Sweden and Finland and then to Australia with my wife and two young kids in the mid-seventies.

The notion that I could write fiction had been in the back of my mind since I could hold a pencil the right way up, and that's where it stayed until one day in 2003, after watching a movie with my son, I remarked that I could have written a better script. He said I should give it a go. After the resulting screenplay was assessed by two agencies, I realised I had a lot to learn about writing drama.

My first novel, Madam, MBA, was initially a writing exercise. However, the more I got into it, the more it took on a life of its own. It's changed a lot over the years - characters have been taken out, others introduced, whole sub-plots reduced to a line or two, if that, and new plot angles incorporated. Somehow it's become a finished product, and I hope readers will get as much pleasure out of it as I've had in writing it.