Starborn Authors
Paul Groves |
Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh |
Sir Albert Thomas ('Archie') Lamb DFC
Brenda Squires |
Michael Joseph Murphy |
Caroline Juler
Geoffrey Toye |
Ann Byrne-Sutton |
Noel Bruton |
Dr. Chris Day
PAUL GROVES (born 1947) is an established and widely recognised poet, whose work
has been acknowledged by his winning of numerous prizes, including the Times Literary
Supplement Prize (twice), the Orbis International Prize, The Charterhouse Award, and the
Bournemouth Festival Award. Four collections of his poetry have been published: Academe,
Menage a trois, Eros and Thanatos and Wowsers and a fifth Qwerty, is to
appear shortly. Paul Groves has worked for nearly twenty years as a lecturer in creative
writing, and has given countless readings of his work, both live and on television and
radio.
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MARGARET PELLING has an Oxford physics degree and worked first in astrophysics research and then in the Civil Service at the Department of Trade and Industry. Previous publications include a poetry collection, That Way (Kite Books), much poetry and short fiction in magazines, and several papers in astrophysics in academic journals. Work for Four Hands is her first novel, and she is working on a second. Born in Dorset, she grew up in Cardiff, and now lives in Oxford, while retaining strong family links with Wales.
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JADE NGOC QUANG HUYNH was born in 1957 in the Mekong Delta Region of South
Vietnam and attended Saigon University until he was thrown into a concentration
camp simply, he says, for being a student. After a year of torture and
degradation he escaped, as one of the 'boat people', and found a new life
in America. There, after a series of factory jobs, he went on to complete
his B.A. at Bennington College, and later received an M.F.A. degree from
Brown University. He was co-editor of Voices of Vietnamese Boat People,
and his first book, South Wind Changing (Graywolf Press 1994),
told of his imprisonment and escape, and was highly acclaimed by the U.S.
national press, with a four-page review in the New York Review of Books,
and two pages in the New York Times. It was short-listed for the National
Book Award and was a Time Magazine Non-Fiction Book of the Year for 1994.
Huynh's works and translations have been widely anthologized including
in: Asian American Literature; Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian
American Writing; Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images;
and Time It Was: American Stories from the Sixties and Beyond.
He has taught at Cardiff University in Wales, Appalachian State University
in N. Carolina and Community College of Vermont.
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BRENDA SQUIRES was born in London. She read German and French at King's College, London and has worked as teacher and translator in Berlin, Zurich and Frankfurt, as a community worker in London, and for the past fifteen years as a psychotherapist. In 1994 she and her husband refurbished a fire-damaged Victorian mansion in West Wales where they now host concerts and run writing workshops. She has a strong attachment to the region and loves walking the rugged Pembrokeshire coastline. She has written three novels and is now working on her fourth.
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MICHAEL JOSEPH MURPHY was born in Birmingham in 1949, and worked for many years in the fire service. He is married with two grown up children and now lives in a small village in South Wales close to where Rocky Seven is set. Involved in the martial arts for over thirty years, he is the Chief Instructor of Seven Dragons Internal Martial Arts Association and the moderator in Tai Chi for both South East and South West Wales Open College Network. He has a B.A. honours degree in psychology and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education.
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CAROLINE JULER is a writer and artist with a long-standing interest in Romania. She is the author of Blue Guide Romania and has previously written two books on Orientalist painting as well as numerous articles for art newspapers and periodicals. Dividing her time between Romania and Wales, she is currently Wales correspondent for Galleries magazine and is helping to set up a crafts project in the Apuseni Mountains of western Transylvania.
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SIR ALBERT THOMAS ('ARCHIE') LAMB DFC joined the Foreign Office as a Clerical Officer in 1938, served with the RAF as a Hurricane and Typhoon fighter-bomber pilot during the Second World War, and returned to the Foreign Office in 1946. After tours of duty as Archivist of the British Embassy in Rome, as Vice-Consul in Genoa and Bucharest, and in the Department in London, he graduated from the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies in Lebanon in 1957. On promotion to the Senior Branch of the Foreign Service he was First Secretary of the Political Residency in Bahrain until 1961, followed by four years at the Foreign Office 'oil desk'. He was Head of Chancery for six months at the Embassy in Kuwait in 1965 before his appointment as British Political Agent in Abu Dhabi. He subsequently served as the Chief Inspector to the Diplomatic Service and as Her Majesty's Ambassador to Kuwait and Norway. He retired in 1981.
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GEOFFREY TOYE was for many years a freelance photojournalist, and well-known especially for his highly informed articles on sailing, archery and high-powered air-guns. His first novel, the thriller Diminished Responsibility (Langdon 1991) was a great success, and also appeared in translation abroad, most notably in Germany where it became a best-seller. His second thriller (see Books list) was written shortly afterwards, and now makes its long-awaited appearance with Starborn. Geoffrey Toye is also a skilled guitarist, and two of his compositions feature in our music list. A collection of short stories from this author is to appear with Starborn in 2003, as is also a study of the application of logic to forensics.
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ANN BYRNE-SUTTON was born in Glastonbury and studied medicine at Bristol. She and her husband, both keen mountaineers, moved to Geneva in 1963. In 1989 she sailed the Atlantic both ways in a 10-metre yacht, making the return trip as sole crew member to a woman friend, and it is planned that her fascinating journal of this trip will appear in due course with Starborn. She has now settled in Pembrokeshire.
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NOEL BRUTON was born in Manchester just in time for rock and roll, which he now enjoys performing occasionally as well as listening to. A linguist by education, he forsook that for computer technical support. Now a management consultant in the IT services industry, he is the author of numerous works in that profession. But in recent years he has turned his writing skills to fiction, and his new thriller-novel, The Virus Doctors, has recently been published by Starborn. He lives with his wife and son in West Wales where he is currently working on two more novels, 'The Chord' and 'The Aquarians', and on several screenplays.
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DR CHRISTOPHER DAY, the author of A Haven for Childhood, is a figure well-known in the architectural world for his radical ideas concerning sustainable, human-being-sensitive building design. His work has won several awards, has been featured in many journals and has been the subject of numerous university studies. Dr Day lectures widely at an international level, and has published two previous books: Places of the Soul (Harper Collins 1990) and Building with Heart (Green Books 1990). He lives in Pembrokeshire, West Wales.
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