The Adult

After leaving Trinity School in Croydon (the setting of my first book Hamlet Bananas and All That Jazz), I went to Keble College, Oxford, to study English. It was there that I met my wife Jinny. Then I lived in Paris for a couple of years working in a school of spontaneous expression, which was run by the shortest, fattest, most explosive couple the world has ever seen. I wonder sometimes what happened to them. Maybe they really did explode.  

I’ve only really had two other jobs – I worked as a publicist for the charity Scope, and as a copywriter for the children’s book publisher Walker Books. For many years I wrote blurbs for books, adverts, catalogues and so on (if you’ve got a Where’s Wally? book, for example, then the words on the back are mine). 

I now work for myself as a full-time author. I’ve got three children, Amy, Kit and Josie, otherwise known as my “guinea pigs” because I try out all my stories on them. Most of the time we live just outside London, but we also have a house in Picardie, northern France, where we go now and then to chill out.

The Child

The Adult

The Author