Mark Cantrell, Author

A coffee-guzzling journalist turned novelist and occasional poet, Mark Cantrell has been chasing the literary dream for years.

Away from novels, Mark has written a good few short stories. They tend to be a broad mix of science fiction, fantasy and horror, but he writes for the story and the characters rather than for any strict adherence to genre. If that mixing and matching makes them harder to place, then Mark's view is 'so be it' but over the years he has managed to place his stories in a variety of 'zines, anthologies and websites.

By now, Mark can measure his writing career in decades (where has time flown?) rather than years, and it traces back to some possibly odd origins. For those who may (or may not) remember the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer, Mark's literary efforts began with this machine when he wrote and published a number of text adventure games, some of which gained critical acclaim, between 1988 and 1990.

Born and bred in Bradford, West Yorkshire, Mark now lives in Stoke-on-Trent. Quite how he came to land in the Midlands is a long story (he'll write about it, some day), but it's quite handy for the commute up to Manchester, where he works as a journalist for a publisher of national and regional trade journals.