I’m a Scottish writer living in Angus with my partner and our three young daughters. I came to writing by a fairly roundabout route, having studied engineering, worked as a handyman, guided visitors around the Scottish Highlands, and helped develop and run tourist accommodation in the far north of Scotland.
Travelling extensively through Scotland—with its fantastical landscapes, characterful people and immersive folklore—filled me with so much inspiration that I was eventually forced into writing simply to avoid bursting. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that beneath the familiar Scotland of mountains, forests, lochs and isolated glens, there might be something older and stranger waiting to be discovered.
That fascination became Spirit Wild, my first completed novel, a YA crossover fantasy rooted in Scottish landscape and mythology. It follows sixteen-year-old Callan MacRae into a world where folklore is considerably less fictional than he believed, and where the boundaries between our world and Tír na nÓg are beginning to break down.
I enjoyed writing a story that placed ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. With Spirit Wild, I attempted to be a plotter, but quickly discovered that the story—and particularly its characters—had other ideas. I found that I rather enjoyed following them and discovering the choices they made along the way. Those choices led me into the things I most enjoy exploring in fiction: friendship, loyalty, betrayal, grief, and the uncomfortable territory between doing what is right and doing what is necessary.
Writing now occupies most of the gaps left between family life, building projects, and disappearing into the hills whenever Scotland provides a sufficiently convincing break in the weather. I’m currently developing further fiction across fantasy, crime and children’s writing, but Spirit Wild is the novel that convinced me I wanted to take writing seriously—and see just how far I could take it.
