When I was very young, I wanted to be a song lyricist. I filled exercise books with words and imagined Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, or even Elvis singing them. I was quite an Elvis fan. I bought my first LP with my 11th birthday money when on holiday in Huntley — Pot Luck by Elvis Presley. But my favourite Elvis song at the time was on an EP (also released in 1962): Follow That Dream.

Once I became a teenager I wanted to be a poet. And then a novelist. Somehow or other, in my thirties, I shifted into biography. I researched the lives of Melville and Hawthorne and wrote a novel about their friendship which I called The Hypothetical Friends — a title changed to Pen Friends when Macmillan published it in 1988.

Then I was commissioned to write a centenary biography of Tennyson in double quick time. It was published in 1992 by Little Brown / Abacus and, given that I was working full-time as a teacher for the greater part of the period in which it was written, I feel I did well in getting to know Tennyson as deeply as I had got to know Melville and Hawthorne over a longer period. There was briefly some interest from a production team on creating a movie about Tennyson’s life on the Isle of Wight, based on the account in my book, but it came to nothing. And to this date that has been my only direct experience of the film/tv world.

For the next twenty years, my teaching career took over and my writing was confined to composing entries for biographical dictionaries and reviewing (for The Scotsman, Literary Review and TES), and also creating copy for ACHUKA, a children’s books recommendation site that I founded in 1997.

Now I am working in the fictional sphere again. I have conjured up an imaginary Aegean island called Arigni (pronounced A-reen-y) and a cast of characters that has the potential to run and run. When I finished working on the ‘novel’ Arigni, I realised that I had constructed it as a story for screen — a story to be watched as much as to be read. And so I set about converting it into a screenplay and am now ready to pitch the idea to film/tv execs. Meanwhile, I am busy working on ARIGNI 2. The book of ARIGNI 1 will be available as a print-on-demand softback this autumn 2026, with ARIGNI 2 coming early 2027 and ARIGNI 3 some time after.