tom_saunders@abctales.com

I'm a writer of short fiction and poetry, but above all else I'm a reader.

I'm 59 years old. I was raised on a council estate on London's not-so-wild western edge and I now live in Oxfordshire with my wife Jean who is an environmental activist and secretary of the Richard Jefferies Society. In my time I've been an engineering draughtsman, a school caretaker, a musician, a seller of guitars and records and a technician with a company importing Aria musical instruments into the UK from Japan.

I began writing in my mid-thirties while taking a BA in English Literature as a mature student (I left school at sixteen) at Kingston Polytechnic. I went on to do an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 1986. My tutors there were novelists Sir Malcolm Bradbury and the wonderful Angela Carter, both now sadly deceased. Pulitzer prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon was writer in residence at the time.