Biography

I was going through my notebooks the other day when I came across a piece of paper; a torn scrap on which I'd written hurriedly a name and the plot number of a grave. Writing a family story is a question of finding where the bodies are buried and this, in very real terms, had been the first clue.  Read more

I first came across Philip Larkin's poems as a schoolboy in the late nineteen-sixties, when I began taking English "A" level and my teacher Peter Way asked our class to talk about Larkin's poems "Wires" and "At Grass." At the time, I had no great interest in poems, but I was interested in these two partly because (as a country boy) I thought that they both had a mistake in them.  Read more

I was extremely lucky. I've had a biographical fiction manuscript accepted and published as a novel.

I've been surprised by the number of people asking me questions about writing and getting published. It seems that many people have a desire to write their life's story or something based upon it.

Although now published, I have not been a writer by profession.  Read more

Scott Turow, President of the US Authors' Guild says 'There are already far too few publishers willing to invest in nonfiction authors, who may require years to research and write histories, biographies, and other works, and in novelists, who may need the help of a substantial publisher to effectively market their books to readers.'