I was brought up in a tiny hamlet in rural Kent, where we lived on the top of a hill overlooking the river Medway valley and the county boundary with Sussex. I graduated with a degree in English and Fine Art from Exeter University in the late 1980’s and went on to do my stint in London while working for some years in publishing, in sales and marketing, for Penguin Books and The Airlift Book Company. I subsequently received an MA in Fine Art and later still, I re-trained as a garden designer.
I have now lived in rural Hampshire for over twenty years, a stone’s throw from the river Test and a village away from the county border with Wiltshire; this is where I brought up my family. I have worked here as a gardener for many years and latterly I ran my own, small, flower farm. For a decade I wrote a regular column for Salisbury Life magazine on gardening but my writing now focuses on my relationship with the natural world and exploring the landscape through walking, more often than not, with my dog. I am currently working on a series of short pieces that blend my observations of landscape and nature with memory. A longer piece of work, looking at the notion of belonging, tracing a long-distance walk I did with my dad, is also on-going.
My work is genre-traversing, being a hybrid of nature writing and memoir; it is literary in its grounding, leaning from creative narrative non-fiction towards lyrical prose poetry. I try to push it out of categories as much as I can, but know I still have a long way to go.
Explore the website using the links below to read some of my recent pieces.
A collection of published work and older pieces with links, where applicable, to the journal or publication where the piece appears. Read more here
A mini-blog of jottings and sometimes longer experimental pieces, which are new and exclusive to the site. Read more here
A page with commentary on what I’m reading, for my thoughts on just that. Read more here