I was born in Ayrshire and educated at Glasgow University, from which I’ve got an MA in English Literature and a PhD in Scottish Literature. My short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. I’ve also written and reviewed for the Herald, the Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and the Spectator. At various times I’ve worked as a University tutor, a bookseller, an educational administrator and as books editor of Caledonia magazine. I currently live in Glasgow and write content for the numerous websites of a travel business called HotelsByPhone.
Scottish Books, The Herald
"My debut novel, CloudWorld, is published by Faber and Faber on 2nd February. It’s an old-fashioned adventure story in which a sheltered young man – Marcus – sets out in search of his lost father. Menaced and imperilled in a variety of landscapes, he comes to a better understanding of himself and the world around him, rather like David Balfour in Kidnapped or Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy. The difference is that the world Marcus inhabits is an imagined one: a world divided by a permanent cloud layer. Mountain peaks rising out of the clouds have citadels built on them – walled city-states like those of Renaissance Italy, whose inhabitants travel in vessels similar to the notional flying machines sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci. Beneath the cloud layer lies a more ancient land: a permanently damp, overcast place inhabited by a Pictish race who compensate for their abbreviated height by being tirelessly brutal. The book is aimed primarily at a young adult readers – 10 years old and upwards – but, as you’ll probably have guessed, in my giddier moments I like to imagine that ‘upwards’ could denote any age from 18 to 80...
The Book That Changed My Life, The Scotsman
“In summer 2001 I moved from Glasgow to Bath to start a new job. At first I stayed in temporary accommodation, in a room piled high with cardboard boxes containing all my possessions (mostly books). Already the sides of the lowest boxes were starting to buckle, causing the ones on top to tilt dangerously. I knew I had to find somewhere proper to live before the topmost boxes fell on me during some indeterminate hour of the night...
Roah Dahl
"Nearly 30 years ago I had dinner with Roald Dahl in the West Indies. It sounds like an exotic event, but it wasn’t exactly an epic meeting of the intellects. For one thing, he was 6 foot 6 inches tall and the author of numerous short stories and children’s books, as well as a James Bond movie. I was 4 foot tall and the author of nothing other than various mishaps, which included falling out of coconut trees and getting bitten by a pariah dog that I’d tried to adopt...
Designed by David Cunningham, Katerina Cunningham, Gavin Deas
Illustrations by David Wyatt