I'm at my desk, it's late, as usual, and you and I sit across the same divide we find in books, one blind mind to another. This is where I should write about accolades, my agency would say; but that's not why we're here, we're here to connect, so I'll be brief with the bio.

 

The romantic angle is that I was born to a bomber pilot-turned-scientist and an air-traffic-controller-turned pianist in an all-girls swing band. My dad ran projects in 140 countries, so I travelled a lot and got to know many codes of the world. I also fucked up my youth and learned a bunch of codes there, codes of dismay - and I eventually started to write. I know this is hugely abbreviated, but here's the thing: everything I've seen and tasted up to now has left me with few certainties but this - our meeting in silence within the pages of a book is a meeting in another life, a life where we can talk and play with what's real, with the things we can't say on the streets, with the symbols of dreams, where we're safe from death and politics and commerce and stupidity. We can also have some laughs and take our time, we can roam other worlds; and if for an instant on a page there's a flash that lights us both up, in a phrase, a setting, some corner of a world - that's where we'll truly meet.

​

My forward bio is to work and stink of coffee until that happens, and when it happens, to dance and stink of booze.

​

​

​