I was born in Berkshire in the middle of the 1976 heatwave. Genetically, I was designed for a cooler planet than the one we’re creating, being of mostly Belgian ancestry, though my mother was French and my father is half Irish. I am, in other words, a north European mongrel. By voice and mannerism I pass for a middle-class Englishman, albeit one with tangled idiomatic expressions and a Gallic intolerance of queuing.
I was educated the expensive way (my GP dad was still paying off school fees into this century) at Wellington College , which I loathed at first and later loved. I have bien pensant reservations about private education, but cannot deny my good fortune in having benefitted from a fine one. In 1994 I went to Oxford University , where I read English Literature and pretended to be a middle aged man. At Oxford I devoted myself to the theatre, and believed I was set for a career in costume drama when I was acc
I had always written – stories and plays, mostly – and unemployment gave me time to write my first novel, The Ship of Fools . This was published by Sceptre in 2002. It was followed in 2004 by Arts and Wonders , for which I won an Arts Council Writers Award. Following a brief spell in the American Midwest (where I participated in the International Writing Programme in Iowa City), I wrote my third novel, Ghost Portrait . In 2006 I took part in a conservation-themed television series, Planet Action , whi