Lawrence Freiesleben – a brief biography
Born in Hammersmith, London, in August 1962, I grew up on a council estate at Aylesbury in Bucks.
In the summer of 1980, needing to be further out of orbit, I found a caravan in North Devon – the beginning of a peripatetic existence, painting and writing in many different parts of the country.
Supplemented by part-time farm work, labouring and stints as a (qualified) youth-worker I’ve scraped by as an exhibiting painter for over 40 years.
My early, experimental novel The Bow, (ISBN-13: 978-1900152655) was first self-published (photocopied) in 1983. A revised edition, re-printed by the independent press, Stride in 2000, was described by the late Colin Wilson as 'full of brilliant ideas and images' and by poet Brian Louis Pearce as 'A liquid, lyric prose achievement of a high order.'
In 2013, I completed the novel Maze End, a psychological drama with explicit as well as philosophical and supernatural aspects.
Many years ago, I was a musician in various late 70s bands – particularly useful inside knowledge for my third novel, Certainty Under the Rose, a searching love story set in the south-west of England. Long-listed for the Tibor Jones, Page Turner Prize in 2017 this has since been substantially revised.
I also write short stories, ( published in CUT and Literature Today for example), essays or “Digressions” for International Times, poems, and reviews, and until recently worked as a reader for Valley Press. I’m currently writing a fourth novel, Estuary and Shadow and a literary thriller (working title: I Knew You Before I knew You).
After living for seven years in the wilds of Northumberland’s North Pennines, and two under the Howgill Fells in Westmorland, with my wife and the youngest of our children, in 2018 we moved to a remote house on the marshes of the Kent estuary in Cumbria.
