I was born at the tail end of 1958, in London. I taught myself Catalan in 1978, and moved to Barcelona in 1984. For years I had been trying to find my written voice in English, to no avail, so when a Catalan publisher asked me if I could do something for him in Catalan, I reckoned I had nothing to lose and gave it a try. From the very first sentence onward, all the problems I'd been having with English fell away. I found my written voice in Catalan first.That text, 'Viatge a Romania' (Trip to Romania) came out in 1990 and as it got good reactions, I decided - perhaps not too wisely - to cut myself out of the English loop altogether. I wrote two novels in Catalan (all right, one of them had an English version), a collection of short stories, autobiography, a road book, and several diatribes and personal essays, all of these in Catalan and Catalan only.As this went on, I got occasional work in TV and radio. (For example, among other things, I presented and scripted two series of an infotainment programme for Catalan Public Television (TV3) back in 2005/2006). Then, gradually, all my original ideas for fiction in English started coming back to me and in 2005 I started a novel that cried out to be written in English: and this time round, I had the same feeling of freedom and control (all at once) that I'd had when first writing in Catalan: in other words, I'd finally found my written voice in my native language.The result took six years to write and is now on sale for Kindle or as a paperback: the novel 'Snug'.It's about a tiny village in the Isle of Wight which finds itself being besieged by Africans who have gone there for that very purpose. Things that have been on my mind for thirty years or more have now finally made their appearance in fiction: racism, anti-Semitism, the colonial legacy (it's still there, should anyone wish to take a look) and teenage love.I am now writing another novel in English.Otherwise, I currently have a regular Sunday column in a Catalan language newspaper (El Punt Avui), a monthly column in the English language magazine Catalonia Today, and contribute occasionally to Barcelona INK (a literary magazine here in Barcelona) and the Times Literary Supplement.For what it's worth, the five main influences would be: William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard and Quim Monzó.I am also a long-term reader of Holocaust history and literature.That's it for now...