I was born in 1973, which sounds pretty cool but which was actually quite ordinary at the time. I grew up in a place called Wales, which is as cool now as it’s always been.
When I was small I liked sledging, Doctor Who, straining to be telekinetic (I’m not), collecting and racing snails, building igloos (that’s how cool Wales can be), Star Wars, roaming too far from home in the company of my cat (Dylan), and hoping for helicopter rescues, conker fights, and a place called Tenby Beach.
At school, people told me I was good at drawing, and it’s funny how telling someone they are good at something seems to help it come true. I drew all the time, especially during mathematics lessons. Sadly, no one ever told me I was good at maths.
Reading came less easily, and I needed additional help at school, but with the guidance of some brilliant teachers I soon really liked doing that too, especially The Three Investigator books, The Lord of the Rings, comics of all kinds, and anything by John Wyndham, Terry Pratchett, Alan Garner, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Arthur C Clarke. Tales of the weird and magical were particularly welcome.
Being a teenager was a bit rubbish, so it was a relief to reach my twenties. I went to Norwich School of Art and Design and then spent three years at art school in Cambridge, where I discovered that you could actually get paid to draw pictures for books! Soon I was doing just that, and you can find out about my very first professional illustration job here.
Somewhere in the back of my mind though, waiting to be noticed, was the dream of writing my own stories, and not just the picture texts I was working on at the time. In a way writing novels was always my secret wish, ever since I first journeyed through the pages of a novel to the Lonely Mountain with Bilbo Baggins or stood beside Bill Masen in the Triffid-haunted streets of London. And suddenly not being telekinetic for real, or be able to see ghosts, or ever at all being rescued by a helicopter didn’t matter, not when I could make it all real in stories. Anything can be real in stories.
After a spell living in France, I now live by the sea on the south coast of England, near Hastings, where I turn biscuits into books for a living. And that’s me.