A brief biography

I worked for many years as a journalist on the Financial Times before becoming a freelance writer in 2009. Although I'd started out writing poetry, the dazzle of riches took me for a while into the world of political thrillers with the publication of a novel, Cold Rain (Grafton Books 1988), before I decided to return to poetry and the happy flutter of rejection slips.
Along the way I've been fortunate enough to win some prizes and Salt Publishing brought out my collection Flatlands in 2010. My latest work, Plainsong, which picks up historically where Flatlands left off, came out from Broken Sleep Books at the end of December 2023. A previous collection, Waiting to Tango, won Templar Poetry's Straid Award and was published in 2016. A slimmer collection, Banquet in the Hall of Happiness, won the Munster Literature Centre's international chapbook competition and was also published in 2016. Some of its poems were inspired by a stint working in co-operation with the China Daily newspaper in Beijing and my later involvement in the running of a series of journalism seminars at Beijing and Shanghai universities.
As for the rest, I was born in Watford, spent my childhood in rural Bedfordshire and have an MA in Writing from the University of Glamorgan, now the University of South Wales. I've got a grown-up family and live with my wife in Essex in a house that's said to have been part of a barracks in the Napoleonic wars. I like to travel a bit.