About Me

“Stories dominated my childhood. I loved reading stories, listening to stories on the radio, telling stories and trying to write them.”

I was born in Billingham in the north east of England and educated in local schools. I then won a scholarship to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge where I took a degree in English and subsequently worked as a teacher, social worker, journalist and lecturer in a college of higher education.

After taking voluntary redundancy from that post I retrained as a teacher of English as a foreign language and taught in Italy and in several language schools in the UK.

Throughout this time I was writing. I had my work broadcast on radio on The Northern Drift and repeated on The Best of the Drift and I had poetry and short stories published and two plays performed by a student drama group. I had also written a novel but, despite the best efforts of three literary agents, it was not published.

In the early nineteen nineties I wrote the first draft of what was to become my novel Sinners. After much editing and many re-writes it is now available on Amazon and was shortlisted for the Hookline Novel Award in 2009.

After retiring from teaching in 2007 I enrolled on the postgraduate Creative Writing course at Anglia Ruskin and graduated in 2009. Since graduating I have completed two further novels, My Very Best Friend and The Growing Season. I have also written a novella Here We Sit like Charlie Cattermole and a number of short stories.

My e-mail address is: [email protected]

Twitter: @bakerfiction.