Biography

I am a professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. I am an astronomer and physicist, teaching students and doing research, using the great telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. My wife is a doctor. We have two daughters, the younger at high school, the elder presently studying in China, as part of her university course in Chinese. We have a busy life, with both my wife and I hard at work or travelling abroad. I am away at scientific meetings, mostly in Europe, between once and twice a month.

We have lived in various countries, England, Germany, France, China and Denmark and have many ties and good friends throughout Europe and in the USA. After my PhD in Cambridge, I moved to Göttingen, then to Bristol, with brief interludes in Paris and Nanjing, and we are now settled in Aarhus.

I have been writing all my life but, until 1992, I had only written scientific articles. I started to write short stories on the metro (the subway) in Paris, to relieve the boredom of a slow train journey to the Paris Observatory each morning, recording on scraps of paper the tales that I was telling my children at the time. One of these stories grew and grew into a book, Friends and Enemies, which I hope that you may find pleasure in reading!

Interests

I like to read Roald Dahl, again and again! I read many novels, both light and serious. I also read science books, for example, ‘Rare Earth’ about the origin of life on Earth, or a biography, such as that of Alan Turing. I play the piano, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, tango, Danish Christmas carols at the laboratory Christmas party (Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, accompanying a bass trombone last year) – in fact any music that is thrust in front of me, so far as I am able to manage it! Very occasionally I take part in a concert, which means hours of practice. I love to go walks with my wife along the seashore, a few hundred yards from where we live, and to go to concerts and events with my wife and the one daughter who is still at home.

Writing these books about Tommy and Eloise, short stories and very, very short nanostories, is a favourite occupation, too. Perhaps one day some of these other stories will be published.
 

If all this raises more questions than answers about the author, then please send me an .