Trust me, I'm a Sagittarian (a brief biog)
I grew up in Langwith, a pit village in north-east Derbyshire, in a household with few books and a lot of people. The nearest library, in Shirebrook, became a home from home, and fed my hunger for reading across the spectrum. I now live in Oxford, where I share a young dog and a lovely family with artist Imogen Rigden.
In my youth I worked on hill farms in the White Peak and Baden-Württemburg.
At uni in Durham I read philosophy, psychology & anthropology, discovered environmentalism, wrote poems and played psychedelic music in Ahimsa. After uni I worked in software: the Concorde project, early on-line systems, very early R&D in AI, network planning, library & resource management systems.
Education and learning became a passion as my daughter grew up, and I switched to research and teaching via mid-life crises and MSc, PhD and PGCE. On the way I helped set up the first community-owned wind farm in southern England (Westmill).
Since the 1970s I’ve been a member of the Ecology Party/Green Party on and off, an organic gardening re-wilding clean water campaigner, and a hands-on activist with BBOWT and The Friends of Burgess Field.
I write free-ranging fiction that draws on all that, and do my best for wild things at every opportunity.
In 2024 I co-founded OxIA (Oxford Independent Authors) with fellow crime writer Colin Wade.
Writers also read. I rarely have fewer than three books in my ‘current reads’ pile - on 07.08.26 those were Death of an Englishman by Anna Beer; Is a River Alive by Robert Macfarlane; and Ethnology by Cathy Galvin. Today (16.09.26): Eve Bites Back by Anna Beer; A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean; The Quigleys in a Spin by Simon Mason; and Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim by Davod Sedaris.
While writing The Price of Dormice I photographed the ‘read and liked’ pile from time to time. Here are some examples of the rain-spattered cultural weather in which I was writing.