About Me
I was born in Bristol, England, but I lived in Zambia in Africa with my parents and two brothers until I was nine years old. Zambia is a very beautiful but very poor country (although it wasn't quite so poor when we lived there). School lessons included things like how to make bricks from straw and mud, and how to dig toilets. Maths was done by writing the sums in the dirt. Coming back to England and sitting in an English classroom was a big shock!
I've been writing stories since I was 11 years old. When I was 14, I had my best school experience ever: my English teacher let me and my friend, Oliver, spend English classes out in the hall writing our first novel together. She even promised to help us get it published, if it was good enough. It wasn't. It was terrible. I didn't learn much about spelling or punctuation or grammar in those English lessons, but I did learn something much more important: that I wanted to be a writer. I kept writing throughout school: comic books, novels, radio comedies, just about anything I could think of. None of it was any good. Most people aren't any good when they start out. The only thing that will ever make you a good writer is practice.
When I went to university, though, I studied physics, getting my PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Essex. Like most people at University, I got distracted from writing, and hardly wrote anything for years.
By the time I finished the PhD, I knew I didn't want to be a lecturer, but I didn't know what else to do as a day job. I still wanted to be a writer, not anything else. I ended up doing a lot of varied jobs--I moved to Guyana in South America for two years to teach physics to secondary school students. I don't know if I was a very good teacher, but they were very good students. I also worked as an editor for two years, did some temporary office jobs. Now I build websites for a living at the University of Leeds.
My big writing breakthrough came in 2001, when I attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, Washington. There were six teachers (all professional writers), and all of us students were expected to write one story a week for six weeks. At the same time, we had to read the stories being written by our sixteen classmates and spend mornings in classes--something I thought would be impossible. It turned out that it wasn't impossible after all, although nobody slept much for those six weeks. Within a year of attending Clarion West, I'd sold my first professional short story.
Back in August 2004, I married Stephanie Burgis, who is a wonderful writer and an even more wonderful person. We now living in Yorkshire, England with our border collie mix, Maya. You can see photos of Maya on Steph's Flickr account. You can also see photos of our first dog, the fantastic Nika, on my Flickr account.
My novels for teenagers and children are represented by Carolyn Whitaker of London Independent Books. You can find out more about my novels and my short stories on this site, and you can also read my regular journal. Thanks for stopping by!
Patrick
This page last updated 26th March 2008.
