After failing my A-Levels (twice), I chose to return to education as a mature student. I studied at Ruskin College, Oxford and then the universities of Warwick and Birmingham, collecting all those letters after my name. I am a strong believer in both life-long learning and foundation teaching, having found my own successes through second-chance education.
As well as being a teacher for twelve years, I am also an editor, which means I work closely with writers to develop their novels to a professional standard. My academic speciality is short fiction, but I also cover areas as diverse as: post-war dystopian fiction, the history of games and competition, modernist art, digital philosophies, and visual methodologies. I also write short fiction of my own and paint portraits in my spare time, when I get any.