My first piece of writing to be published was my story “The Faraday Cage” which was shortlisted in the 2014 Short Story Competition and then included in the resulting anthology “Seaglass” published by Black Pear Press. The story was the product of an exercise that was part of a short story course run by the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Leeds. I owe a huge debt to Ebba Brooks, the tutor on this course. Small independent publishers are invaluable to writers who are starting to make their way into the challenging world of trying to get work published.

Emboldened by being shortlisted in 2014 I entered two stories into the second Black Pear Press Short Story Competition in 2016 and was thrilled that I got second place with “The Photographer” (Read The Photographer) I was even more pleased with the judge’s comments: “really effective, tight writing, that shows us a whole lifetime in a very elegant, controlled way.”

My other entry to the 2016 competition was a story called “Until Four” which you can read here Until Four

Both “The Photographer” and “Until Four” were published in the resulting Black Pear Press anthology “On the Day of the Dead”.

My first novel On Borrowed Time was set in Hong Kong around the period of the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. The novel explores issues of personal responsibility and choice set against the political context of the time. Currently I am writing a second novel (The City of Wine and Wormwood) set in 1949 and1950 in the former Portuguese colony of Macau, now a Special Administrative Region of China. The other side of the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, Just an hour or so away by hydrofoil, Macau is a popular playground for Hongkongers. With a much longer history than Hong Kong, and being such a colourful mixture of traditions and cultures, I am always surprised by how little people know about the city and that it hasn’t featured more often in books and films.

This fascination with Macau led to my first collection of short stories, The Goddess of Macau, published by Fly on the Wall press in 2020. The collection included, The Jade Monkey Laughs (“unexpected and graceful…told with wonderful poise”) which had previously won 3rd Prize in the 2017 Ilkley Literature Festival Short Story Competition and went on to win the English section of the 2018 Macau Literary Festival short story competition, and the story “And All Will Be Well” that won the 2018 Ilkley competition. You can read this story here And All Will Be Well