Although I was trained as an art student at Saint Martin's School of Art, in London, later I started writing novels, short stories, and poetry. Both painting and writing have travelled along on parallel although rarely similar paths.

If you pursue an alternative art form in middle life, it is influenced by many personal experiences up to that date. No one really knows what triggers a dramatic change of direction, but emotion and accident played a strong part for me. Having had my graduate education in visual arts, images of incidents and their backgrounds later became imprinted in a literary way. It is as though they were thrown onto a wider canvas. The book form then became an added thrill because it represented written descriptions of circumstances as well as emotional interactions involved.

The historical novel is particularly suited to my way of thinking. Again, an analogy with visual art is that in inventing a situation onto an almost unlimited verbal canvas it can be spread out to include time, history, landscape, human relationships and destiny. Seeing this printed on paper is to invite readers to experience situations in unexplored panoramas. It is a wonderful challenge, and a very exciting one to undertake.

Poetry takes a different form. It is a synthesis from just as important circumstances but pared down to their intrinsic value. The novel can have hundreds of pages yet poetry is best at its shortest, unless it is in epic form. Why take the trouble to write a novel, if you can write a poem? They have different uses, neither one excluding the other. Poetry can be a response to the immediate impulse of a situation or emotion, but essentially it must also be carefully crafted into shape.

Satisfaction of writing in any form is to create out of the air of random imagination, stream of consciousness or some important actuality. Again it is like a pure primed canvas or clean white page waiting to be filled with calculated words that can later be given to an unknown audience of readers.

I live in Liverpool. My life has been full; with marriage, three children and now grandchildren.

Initially I trained myself in writing, and by attending a number of Arvon Foundation courses, which were of great benefit to me. Because my change towards literature has been late I have accumulated seven novels, much poetry, and adult and children's short stories. These are my major interests now and I am ready to market what I have written.