About Me

When I was twelve years old my sister gave me Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" to read. When I finished it, I knew I wanted to be a writer. It took a decades long trip through space and time to fulfill that dream. "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans" said John Lennon and a lot of things did happen.

When I was four years old I was almost eaten by a hyena in Kenya. At 8 I spent a year in Sydney's swanky Bondi Beach neighborhood, which at the time was a bit of a dump. At 14 I went abroad again with my parents, this time to Oxford, UK. At 18 I was drafted and spent three years in the military, which I didn't really like. One of the few episodes I did enjoy was being posted to an outpost in no man's land on the Syrian-Israeli border. Everything was lush and green and black and dour. To get to the outpost you had to cross the border fence and drive along a road potholed almost to oblivion. It was so isolated it felt like being in a spaceship. The commanding officer spent his time chasing herds of goats and their shepherds, who were frequently carrying military grade field glasses.

The first thing I did after being discharged was go to Scandinavia. In later years I travelled through much of Europe, from the black beaches of Iceland to the coast of Malaga and from Devon to the Bosphorus. I also missed 9/11 by a couple of hours, boxed with a drunk man in Thailand, ate something bad in India on multiple occasions, rode a bus in Laos with a live pig and some chickens in the hold, spent hours gazing at the ice fields of the Andes, nearly drowned somewhere in Patagonia and spent a year living in Japan.

Somewhere in between I managed to go to university and get a job. Now I write and translate. I hope you enjoy it.