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Biography

My parents were professors of biochemistry so I decided to be a writer. I wrote my first story when I was thirteen, and after the teacher read it out loud in class, I began to take myself very seriously. I imagined the life of Hemingway. I never considered that writing required so [...]

Biography

Born in Glasgow in 1945, I grew up in Edinburgh and went to George Heriot’s School. After a short spell working for an Insurance company, I joined the Civil Service in London. Shuffling files around was not my thing though so I took up a place at Aberdeen University where I studied [...]

Biography

I grew up in a small town in Ireland when money was tight, jobs were scarce, and there were only two TV channels. Books were my salvation.       The local library was where I found most of my reading material. I zipped through the children’s books and used my mother’s library ticket [...]

Biography

Learning to read is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me; it may also be the reason for my extreme short-sightedness. As a child, I spent night after night squinting my way through Enid Blyton books, their pages lit by the ribbon of light that ran across the bottom [...]

Biography

I was born in Manchester in 1971. We moved away when I was little and I grew up a few miles from where I live now, near Nottingham. When I was 8, my mum encouraged me to submit a poem to the Charnwood Arts Writing Competition. The poem was a deeply philosophical [...]

Biography

I grew up in San Diego, although I am not the typical California girl you are probably imagining. But yes, my high school did offer SURF as a class. It was customary to see people at the grocery in their bathing suits and bare feet. We did know our neighbors by what [...]

Biography

I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, the sort of place with a few white steepled churches in the center of town, hilly woods, and lots of narrow, winding roads. I live now, with my wife and two daughters, in the middle of Baltimore, a city that’s both sprawling and [...]

Biography

I find myself easily lost amongst the millions of Chris Smiths out there, so I’ve split myself up to gain a greater share of my name: I teach kayaking and climbing, I lead overseas youth-development expeditions, I’m marrying an American, I filmed an international documentary on street performing (www.thebuskingproject.com), I [...]

Biography

I currently live in San Francisco, but grew up in a small town in the western part of Maine. Many of my best stories take place there, and although I’ve slowly acclimated to the city, my guess is that I’ll never stop writing about where I grew up, or about rural people [...]

I am a dreamy and nerdy bookworm pretending to be a tough adult, hoping that no one rumbles me. I was ill as a child and often had a touch of the Elizabeth Barrett Brownings: blanket and sleeping dog on my lap. It helped to have pen, paper and a vast world of [...]