Although I knew when I was ten years old that I wanted to write, it took me a while to get around to it.  I was born in the USA but I have spent very little time there. My mother is Irish and, when my French/British father died, she went back to Ireland with her children. So, from the age of six I grew up in Dublin. The unpredictable river in my novel Silent People was inspired by the Dodder river which flows fast down the Wicklow mountains and through the city of Dublin. My grandparents lived on Lower Dodder Road which has the Dodder river flowing along one side of it. When I was nineteen I went to London where I did various jobs including working as a trainee millineer for a brief period.  Later I moved to Cambridge where I trained to be a carpenter and joiner, before going to Clare College to study architecture.	photo by Dumbletons
I worked as an architect for several years, designing mainly sheltered housing and school buildings, before finally taking up writing. Silent People is my first published novel.  My next will be called A Calculated Act and is about crime and self-defence. As well as writing, I also paint a little and I am planting a small woodland of native trees in Cambridgeshire where I live. You can see its progress on this website, under Planting a Woodland.  Here is a picture of me planting a tree.
A novel approach  -  article in The Cambridgeshire Journal, June 2006: Back to Homepage Links page Silent People Paintings