My writing

I’ve always enjoyed writing stories since I was a little lad growing up in Wensleydale, in the Yorkshire Dales, but after a degree in English Literature at Sheffield University (reading other people’s stories), something called ‘work’ got in the way for about the next thirty years.

A career in market research brought me to London, and then for a while to Paris, and gave me many interesting insights into human nature and behaviour, but the creative writing definitely went on the back burner. If I had one piece of advice now to younger people embarking on a career, I’d encourage them to somehow still find time outside their work to express their creativity, in whatever form it takes.

About ten years ago, my wife called my bluff. Spotting an ad for the inaugural year of a Creative Writing MA at St Mary’s University, South West London, close to where we live, she more or less told me to ‘put up or shut up’. Harsh but fair. I worked there on an embryonic novel, Melting in the Middle, which I then launched during lockdown in 2020. And now I’m just launching my second novel, Coming Clean, in October 2024.

On the surface, the two novels are very different. If I’m asked what they’re about, I say something like ‘Melting is a rom-com about the Marketing Director of Britain’s most dysfunctional chocolate company going through a mid-life crisis’, while Coming Clean is about ‘A Bulgarian cleaner working for a British MP who discovers secrets that could ruin his career.’  But what I’ve discovered about my own writing is that I seem to keep returning to some themes which interest me – complex family relationships, flawed human beings, failure, forgiveness and redemption. And humour in adversity.

What will I write next? Not sure, but there’s a book about being a lifelong Hull City fan that I’ve been musing on for some time – what was that I was saying about complex relationships?