ABOUT GUS

I’m a Leicester writer whose short stories have appeared in literary magazines and online. Many of those stories are collected in my book, Angel Reach.

I’m also author of the novel Kyiv Trance and author of the young adult novels Earthrise and Marmalade Skies.

Very happily married with two children, I’ve travelled widely and worked as a mechanical engineer, fruit picker, construction worker, environmental activist, writer, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal skills facilitator, and mature student (MA creative writing; MSc building surveying).

How did the writing begin? I think it was the travelling that got me started. Fresh from ditching an engineering career in the early 1980s, I found my road guru lying stoned and unconscious at the edge of a vineyard in the afternoon sun, an empty Beaujolais bottle in the grass and a Jack Kerouac novel spread-eagled on his chest.

We picked grapes in the same picturesque French villages; laboured in olive groves on Crete and pumpkin paddocks in New South Wales; sought enlightenment in India and did the Auf Wiedersehen Pet bit on building sites in Germany. We followed seasonal work doing pretty much everything from thousand-acre wheat harvests to beachcombing. We slept in cornfields and woke up at dawn to wash our faces in the morning dew and start hitchhiking …

Tom Waits once sang about living on nothing but “dreams and train smoke”.