Educated at Dover Grammar School, Kent, and then at the University Of Birmingham, where I studied microbiology and philosophy. After variously working as a shadow puppet theater manager and prospective jazz saxophonist, I taught myself computer programming, becoming a freelance consultant. My writing career began, aged nine and a half, when I won a national TV children's short story competition. Thereafter my writing became dormant, apart from a couple of Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews, until it was revived in protest against a religious movement I once belonged to. Through the latter experience I gained an understanding of the mechanism by which the arrogance of cults brings out the very worst in human nature. It also provided much useful character study for my subsequent writing, as, for much more positive reasons, did my permanent move to live in the Republic Of Ireland, thirty years ago.