Born in 1947 in London to Irish parents returning to Ireland after the War, my dad having been a doctor in the Indian Army Medical Corps. My mum was 43 at the time and hadn't been pregnant before and I think my arrival was a big surprise to everybody concerned. If I suffer any obscure mental abberation as a result people have been kind enough to keep it from me. By my first birthday my parents had moved to Co. Donegal where my dad started working as a country G.P. The only childhood I can remember was in Ireland. My dad had a deep vein of dissatisfaction and kept on moving from one medical practice to another, so that by the time I was 10 I had been to something like six different primary schools and the family had ended up in Belfast, where we settled until I was about twenty-two.

My mum was an avid reader and taught me to read before I went to school. As a result I was bored and disruptive during the lessons when the others were being taught to read, until a bright nun devised the tactic of letting me sit at the back of the class writing a story while the others did their work. I found that I enjoyed this and got an enormous thrill if the story was praised or if I was allowed to read it out to the class. My main motivation in becoming a writer I think is to gain the approval of a long dead Irish Sisters of Mercy nun. My life after school was also amazingly bitty and complicated. I was a student at Queens University Belfast during the early 1970s when the present wave of violence started. I wasn't personally involved except to the extent of designing and building a series of pirate radio transmitters and setting up the Northern Ireland Free Radio stations (starting with Radio Free Belfast) that became the voices first of the Roman Catholic people and the Civil Rights Movement, and later, it has to be said, of the Provisional IRA. Don't blame me.

The other thing I did while a student was develop a taste for communal living and alternatives to the nuclear family, and the desire to found or live in the perfect anarchic communal group. This aspiration dominated my life for a coupe of decades afterwards. I think I've got it out of my system now though. Because of the pirate radio stations I was politely requested by the authorities to leave Northern Ireland, which I dutifully did after graduating from QUB. I came to England and enrolled for an M.A. in Philosophy in the University of London (and got a grant to do it!) and had a great time over here pretending to study and doing the rounds of the British communal groups. Got the M.A. and then to my amazement was accepted for Ph.D. registration and GIVEN ANOTHER GRANT!!! I bet present day students are envious. The student world has changed in a big way since then. In fact I never finished the Ph.D. though I remained registered for an embarrassing number of years. I'm afraid I just ran out of enthusiasm, and let the real world intrude too much. Nearing my forties by this time and never having developed the work habit, I lived off a little bit of teaching and writing other people's dissertations for them and the like and settled down with a woman named Jean, with whom I was in an open threesome originally. Number three decided he was gay and very understandably wandered off. A pity because I liked him.

I hope you're taking notes, there'll be a brief test after this. I've really got to start summarising. Jean and I effectively bought out the other commune members so we ended up co-owning a very large house in Tottenham. We've moved to Walthamstow now but we're still together. We have separate flats in the same large house and see as much or as little of each other as we want to. Jean has an adopted daughter Cherelle to whom I have acted as father since she was six weeks old. She's at Liverpool University now and doing very well. She has my laptop on extended loan so is obliged to keep on good terms with me. In fact we never had a problem or a bad moment worth mentioning with Cherelle, she's a lovely girl.

Just remembered, this is supposed to be about writing isn't it? Well, I entered a few small short story contests in Ireland over the years and was placed a few times, but the event that made me think I might have some kind of worthwhile talent for writing was when a story of mine called Blind Date won a local radio competiton in London, some time in the early 1990s. It was print-published and reproduced in a lot of different places afterwards, and with this encouragement I started entering the larger competitions, particularly the Fish in Ireland, and always or almost always made it to the final short list. I started to take writing a bit more seriously, set up my own web page, and in the year 2000 got a science fiction novel called "SIRAT" published in America. The reviews were very good although it took a long time for the sales to reach the first thousand. It's just nudged past the second thousand now thanks to a talk that I was asked to give at an American university about the ideas underlying the story. It presents a highly possible scenario for the first emergence on earth of true electronic intelligence, and, if nothing else, is well researched. I love good science fiction and had great fun writing it.

The next major event was in 2002 when my entry "Letting Go" was placed second in the Fish. Second prize is a week at a place called Anam Cara Writers' and Artists' Retreat in Co. Cork in Ireland, and during this week I got the inspiration for a loosely linked collection of short stories called "The Rainbow Man". It's just been published by Bluechrome/Boho and I think it's the best thing I've done so far, although I know it will be more difficult to sell than "SIRAT" because short stories just are, it seems. Any questions?

Writers that most influenced me. When I was a child my parents had a big collection of the stories of O.Henry, which I discovered I loved. He is probably best known for his trick endings. However, there's a lot more to him than that. He wrote about ordinary, mostly completely insignificant and marginalised people, and showed their lives to be just as important and interesting as those of the rich and powerful. He had a concept of the dignity of all human life, including the lives of the down-and-outs of New York City where he lived. In reply to the then popular notion that there were only four hundred people worth knowing in New York, O. Henry wrote a collection entitled "The Four Million" (the total population of New York City at that time). If you think of Victorian and earlier literature that was pretty unusual. He wrote in the first decade of the twentieth century and was dubbed "the prophet of the century of the common man". How wonderful it would be to be immortalised in a phrase like that! After O.Henry the biggest influences on me were probably science fiction writers. I have always been excited by philosophical notions, theories and speculations about what reality might be like, and this is stuff of good science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak and Isaac Asimov were my gods for a long time. Then I found a writer who combined the scientific speculation with a truly well-developed human perspective. This was Daniel Keyes, author of "Flowers for Algernon" and "The Touch". Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" was another book that swept me away, and if I'm honest the sustained joke that holds "The Rainbow Man" together probably traces its origins to this work. As I got older I became more accepting of stories that examined only the human condition, not the nuts and bolts that hold the universe together. I have benefited mightily by meeting people on the Internet and joining virtual writers' groups. I have also found online writers that I greatly admire, including Tom Saunders, Ed Bruce and Laura Hird. In my own writing I think I have developed a love of subtext and understatement and feel that I have succeeded most when the story takes place inside the reader's head and is only loosely hinted at by the one that appears on the page. I suppose I'm just perverse.

David Gardiner