Meet The Author
Writer, designer, photographer and a collector of inconvenient questions.
It’s traditional to write these biographies in the third person, so I can talk about all my awards, accolades and achievements without sounding big-headed. However, as I haven’t really got any, I'll just talk directly. The truth is, most of what I do isn’t really about what I know. It’s about what I notice.
I just about sneaked in as a child of the sixties, which, in my mind, makes me more protest singer than glam rocker. As a kid, I found myself constantly baffled and befuddled by the world around me. My head was full of delightfully intriguing questions, but even when I managed to articulate them, the stock answers — "Because I said so," "That's just how things are," and "Stop asking awkward questions" — all sounded suspiciously like admissions that nobody really knew much more than I did.
Even then, it seemed pretty clear I was going to have a complicated relationship with reality. Well... perhaps not reality itself. More the officially approved version of it.
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A Meeting of Minds:
The author (pictured left) and Chester contemplate the mysteries of the universe.
Then came 1993 and my first tentative steps into the corporate world. It was a simpler time, when Mr Blobby topped the charts and spirituality still occupied the quieter corners of bookshops rather than every corner of the internet. As an eager young Trainee Pricing Assistant, I was sitting at my desk one day (dreaming of becoming an Assistant Pricing Assistant), when a colleague handed me a book that would give all those questions somewhere to go. Over the following three decades, it led me through Eastern philosophy, mysticism, psychology and the nature of consciousness. As I dug deeper, I became less interested in what people think and increasingly fascinated by who — or what — is doing the thinking, how identity is constructed, and why the voice in our heads is permitted to comment on absolutely everything despite possessing no obvious qualifications.
For more than twenty years, I worked as a healthcare analyst. It ticked all the proper grown-up boxes for a good job with prospects, but it was never what you would call soul-nourishing work. However, it did teach me two important things. Firstly, large organisations seem to run less on manpower and money than on coffee and meetings. And secondly, ‘facts’ are often far more malleable than I had been led to believe.
While studying patterns in public health, I became increasingly fascinated by the psychological machinery of modern life — and why a society designed to make everything easier seemed to be leaving so many people anxious, exhausted and quietly wondering whether they had somehow missed something important.
Eventually, these themes found their way into my debut novel, The Curious History of Joshua Ramdinkka.
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Set in a quirky Southern European village, The Curious History of Joshua Ramdinkka follows a man who finds himself inheriting more than just the family vineyard. Beneath its dark humour and eccentric cast lies a quieter exploration of identity, expectation, and the invisible assumptions that shape our experience of the world. It was already asking many of the questions that would later find their fullest expression in The Fractured Soul.
More recently, another piece of the puzzle has quietly fallen into place. Looking back over the years, I now realise that all the evidence points towards me being AuDHD. And while this doesn't explain the questions, it may help explain why I never stopped asking them.
Beyond my love of the written word — particularly when arranged on actual pieces of paper — I’m also a photographer, digital artist, speaker and book designer, which means I spend a slightly worrying amount of my life moving things by two millimetres, deciding they looked better before, and putting them back again. I’m the founder of Lonely Monkey Studios — an organisation currently employing no monkeys — and co-founder of Mystic Mouse, an organisation that does, at least, have a mouse on the payroll. I’m also the creator of The Lone Wolf Path, a side exploration of creativity, inner wisdom, and what becomes audible when the noise of modern life finally falls silent. Think of it as a blueprint for people who really don’t want to be herded into communities (even when those communities have been created for people who don’t want to be in communities).
My work tends to inhabit the curious territory where philosophy, psychology, spirituality and gentle scepticism overlap. I’m not especially interested in telling people what to think. I’d much rather invite them to look a little more closely at the assumptions they may never have realised they were making.
It's probably fair to say that I’ve become wary of certainty and much prefer curiosity. I also happen to believe humour is often the safest way to approach life’s deepest questions — particularly when those questions threaten to dismantle your entire understanding of yourself.
I certainly don’t pretend to have found all the answers.
To be honest, I’ve never been entirely convinced they were the interesting part anyway.