am Philip Spires, born in June 1952 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in the north of England. I spent my first ten years in Sharlston, which was then a mining village, and the next eight in Crofton, a mile nearer Wakefield.

I then went to London University, where I obtained a degree in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College and then a PGCE from King's. Then I spent two years as a VSO in Kenya, the experience which provided much of the material for Mission.

During the next 16 years in London, when I worked in schools and colleges, I devoted much of my spare time to assisting my wife's work with a small charity concerned with development and human rights in what we used to call the Third World.

In 1992 I completed a Master's Degree in Education and, at the end of the year, took a technical education post in Brunei and lived in South-East Asia until 1999. For the next three years I worked in Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. Since 2003, my wife and I have lived in Spain, where we have our own small tourism business. The space that this created allowed me to complete a PhD with the Open University in the contribution of education to personal and economic development in the Philippines and, after that, my first published novel, Mission.

We currently live in La Nucia, just 5 kilometres from Benidorm on the Costa Blanca.