I was born in Leicestershire in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and
a primary school teacher. I was fascinated with books from an early age. As a small boy, I reorganised the spare bedroom of our house into a library for
my parents' books. This might sound like a useful thing for a child to do, but instead of ordering the books by subject
or author, they were organised by size and colour, which made more sense to me at the time.

It wasn't until I was about fourteen years old that it occurred to me that I might write for a living. I tried to make the covers of my school rough books look like the covers of novels. I produced a whole "Ruf Notes" trilogy as well as "A Complete Guide to Ruf Notes" each with its own reviews and biographical details on the inside covers and publisher's blurb on the back. Of course, there was nothing inside the books -except the rough notes that I took during lessons!
In 1984 I came to Nottingham to study architecture. It was while I was at college that I first started developing my skills as a writer and illustrator. I was in a band for a short time - it was a pretty crummy band. We never even played a gig, we just fooled around pretending to rehearse. But, because I was the only one that couldn't play an instrument, I had to sing (I am using the word 'sing' very loosely here) and this meant that I also had to write lyrics. I enjoyed this and kept on writing lyrics and poems long after the band had become no more than an embarrassing memory. Then, one day, I decided to try to do an illustration to accompany the lyrics to one of the songs. I was pleased with the result, so I illustrated some of my poems, spending more and more time on each picture.

After leaving college, I worked as an architect for some time. I helped to design and build a variety of projects including an art gallery, a theatre and an airport check-in building. However, I was never very happy in the job and I was always saying that I didn't want to be doing it in ten years time. My wife, Rachel, was always telling me - selflessly - that she would support me if I wanted to give up architecture in order to pursue a career as a writer / illustrator. But I couldn't face the possibility of giving up a steady job and then failing to get anything published. When I did actually give up architecture in 1995, it was because I was made redundant. I didn't jump - I had to be pushed!
Fortunately, three months after being laid-off, I signed up with a good literary agent and, a couple of months later, I sold my first pop-up book "Scraposaurus Wrecks". You might think that it would be plain sailing from then on, but it wasn't. Although I finished illustrating and designing the pop-ups for the book, it was never published. Although this was a big disappointment, the fact that I had sold the story, and been commissioned to illustrate and paper-engineer it, gave me the confidence to continue working on children's books and I subsequently succeeded in getting into print.

If you would like to have your pop-ups exhibited at the International Pop-up Gallery. just send your digital image to popupgallery@aol.com.

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