Neil was born in St. Helens, Lancashire, England, in September 1940.
He enjoys listening to classical music or country and western when not writing (or walking his dog), but also likes to keep his hand in with occasional software development.
Although now retired from the "day job", for most of his working life Neil was involved in the IT industry, having first learned to program on IBM computers back in the heady days of the early 1960s when machines had virtually no memory, were painfully slow, and one with the power of today's PC would require a massive room the size of a football pitch to accommodate it. Well, OK, a slight exaggeration on the last point, but modern day programmers have it easy! As a software designer and developer, he undertook numerous consultancy projects until retiring in 2002.
Neil Mavrick is actually a pseudonym, being an anagram of his real name - a fact that will explain why there is no 'e' in Mavrick? He'd used the only one in Neil !

Neil's novels are based around a particular theme that runs though the story, hopefully without imposing itself on the reader. In the case of Connecting Lives (in the pipe-line but not yet published) the theme is the attitude of people and nations to one another; in Connecting Obsessions it is based around ecology and the environment, though ambition also plays its part. The stories are not about such themes, and his intention is not to lecture or impose ideas, but to encourage the readers to think more about such issues and whether or not they are playing their part, and doing enough.
Having decided upon this underlying theme he then builds a story line that can accommodate it, and one that contains unexpected and original ideas. Above all he attempts to develop characters that the reader will either love or hate but, more importantly, believe in and a story line that is both engrossing and believable, even when elements of fantasy are involved - and they usually are!