I was born in Sunderland, a city in the north-east of England.
I don’t recall too much about my first 8 years of life other than I loved being outdoors especially in the woods near our house. I came home every night covered in scratches.
My first real book memory is being given C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew by my English teacher, Mrs Baldwin. I loved that, and all the other Narnia books.

So how did I become an author?
As a parent I was used to making up short and funny stories for my daughter, Rachel. When she was about ten, however, she wanted a story about a really, really nasty witch. This time I put pen to paper and what started off as a tiny scrap of an idea got bigger and bigger and BIGGER. It became The Doomspell.
After I finished it, I continued my love affair with fantasy by creating The Silver Sequence which I still think is probably my best and definitely my most original work. Following that, I tried to scare everyone half to death with a couple of ghost novels – Breathe and The Hunting Ground.

I could tell you more about myself, but the truth is that perhaps the biggest gift we can give anyone is our imagination and everything important I have to offer you about that is in the novels.