About the Author

Peter Gilmour was born in 1941 in Glasgow, where he still lives. He was sent at the age of eight to a boarding school and then, at thirteen, to a public school. Then there was a series of dull jobs, and at the first in the Yorkhill Dock, Glasgow, he strongly had the sense that he was or could be a writer, even though he had written absolutely nothing at the time. He then worked in a publisher's firm and then a bookshop. Eventually he went to Strathclyde University and Stirling University after which, furnished with two degrees, he got a job with the Open University as an associate lecturer. This sustained him and counted as a career until he retired with great relief in 2007. Happenstance Press has published his collection of poetry, Taking Account, and he is at work on another novel. At the age of 71 his future seems at once wondrously open and damningly shut.