Author Tim Bowler - Winner of the Carnegie Medal

"I live in the south-west of England in a sleepy Devon village. It's a beautiful county and I've lived there since 1983. My workroom is an old stone outhouse ten minutes' walk from my home. You can see a bit of it in the photos over to the right of this page. Family and friends call it Tim's Bolthole. It's situated in a quiet part of the village with nothing to hear but birdsong and the occasional snort of horses in some stables. When the weather's fine, I take my laptop out of the bolthole and into a nearby meadow so that I can sit and write outside. It's a lovely spot with hills rolling away into the distance, a badger sett down to the left and the tower of the village church just visible to the right. There are lots of foxes, rabbits and birds and sometimes you can see wild deer on the far slopes. It's a great place to think and write.

Writing is my life. I have lots of things I love doing - playing sports, reading, listening to music, walking, practising yoga, translating foreign languages - but for me writing is special. I've written stories all my life. I'm a storyaholic. I believe in the power of stories to move us, entertain us and transform us. To me, writing is as much about listening as it is about putting down words. I start from characters and settings. If the characters and settings are strong enough, then I usually find the plot reveals itself, albeit through a sometimes laborious series of rewrites. Some people think there must be a set of rules for writing but the truth is there aren't any. It's more like tickling trout, holding your hand out and trying to coax the ideas to swim into your grasp; or being a potter, throwing the rough clay of your thoughts down and letting the story twist out under the palms of your hands; or being a sorcerer, stirring the cauldron of your imagination and watching the vapour of the story rise. Writing is all these things and many more. It's something you never bottom, never crack, never stop learning about. And that's why I love it."

Tim Bowler

Tim was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a town situated on the south-east coast of England at a point where the Thames estuary widens into the North Sea and the ebb-tide leaves vast mudbanks stretching out from the shore. It's a very atmospheric place, especially the old seaside village called Old Leigh with its cobbled streets and cockle sheds and fishing boats. The house he grew up in overlooked the estuary and much of his time as a boy was spent in or on or just looking at the water. He attended a local grammar school called Westcliff High School for Boys and at nineteen went away to the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich and studied Swedish and Scandinavian Studies for four years. One of these years was spent living in Sweden. After graduating, Tim married and worked in (among other things) forestry, timber, teaching, translating and various other jobs for several years before going full-time as a writer. He has written since the age of five. He wrote short stories and comics as a boy, then mostly poetry in his student days. Tim started his first novel, Midget, at the age of 25 and wrote most of it during the early mornings between 3-7 a.m. before going out to work.

Midget is a psychic and psychological thriller set in Leigh-on-Sea. Having lived and sailed in the area throughout his early life and known the magical beauty of the estuary, Tim had always wanted to use the setting for a novel. For some reason the ending came into his mind first. He was walking by the estuary one day, looking out over the mudbanks, and a picture came to him fully formed of the final dramatic moment of the novel. Tim had no idea how the story was going to get to that point. It took him ten years of writing to work out the answer. The book is a study of power abuse and sibling rivalry taken to an intense degree. It concerns a boy of fifteen who is three foot tall and tortured by his elder brother. His acquisition in mysterious circumstances of a sailing boat that he has long coveted sets off a chain of events that seem to release him from his pain but ultimately lead to tragedy, though the ending is intended to be cathartic and positive.

Tim's second novel, Dragon's Rock, is set in Devon. It's another thriller, this time about earth magic and prejudices and the way our inner natures impact on our outer environment. The story came to him while he was finishing Midget. At the time he used to live in a small village near to Dartmouth and most days had to travel on his motorbike to the town of Totnes. On the way he'd pass a low stone wall along the top of a field, at the bottom of which was the crumbling ruin of a farmhouse (which is still there to this day). A mile down the road, high up on a hill, was a solitary standing stone that broke into view as his motorbike crested the rise, then vanished a few seconds later when the hedge cut it from view. Before long, as Tim rode to Totnes, he was stopping by the stone wall to gaze down at the ruined farmhouse, and then, a mile later, stopping again to gaze up at the standing stone – and on the way back from Totnes, he would do it all over again. Soon Tim was writing a novel about a ruined farmhouse and a standing stone called Dragon's Rock.

His third novel is called River Boy. The story seemed to come in snatches of dream that initially made no sense. The title came first. It just popped up like bread out of a toaster. Tim had no idea what the words meant or what he was going to do with a river and a boy, then pictures of his grandfather started to appear. Tim's grandfather was a lovely old man who died when he was 14, nothing at all like the crusty old grandfather in the novel, though Tim grew very fond of him, too, by the end of the book. A young girl drifted into the story like a ghost. She was called Lucy in the first draft, then for some reason she became Jess. Tim wrote one draft but couldn't seem to work out what he was trying to say, then one day his wife came home with a painting of a river and suddenly the fictional grandfather became an artist and he knew suddenly that the painting and the river and the boy and swimming would become spiritual metaphors and that the book was going to be about life and death and love and hope.

Shadows, his fourth novel, is a gritty love story based on the effects of overbearing parental influence in the arena of top-level teenage squash. Tim is a very keen squash player and had always felt that it would be a good topic to cover in a novel. He also likes the gladiatorial quality of one-against-one sport. The characters are based to some extent on people he has actually known. He started off writing only about a young boy and his relationship with his father, who is desperate for his son to become a champion squash player and succeed where he himself had not. But before Tim knew what was happening, a young girl had appeared in the story, a pregnant girl sleeping rough and in terrible danger – and suddenly he was writing a completely different story which turned into a tough, fast-moving thriller.

Storm Catchers had a strange beginning. Tim had just finished River Boy and was back at his desk after posting the manuscript to his agent. He switched on his computer, took a deep breath, and started the book he'd been brooding about for several months, which went on to become Shadows. While he was writing Shadows, however, images of another, quite different novel flooding through his mind. Before long he was finishing each day's work on Shadows with some doodling on this strange other story. It started with a girl who hears a tapping sound in the night while she's looking after her little brother and although she's frightened, she goes downstairs to investigate. Tim wrote Chapter 1 without having the slightest idea where Chapter 2 was going to go but somehow or other the next time he looked up (or so it felt), he was a month older, the book was on Chapter 12. The story was tumbling out of him at a rate of knots. It wasn't to last, however, and he finally lost his way with it after about fifty thousand words. Tim then had a dilemma. Shadows was taking shape pretty well but there was this other novel about a girl who is kidnapped and her older brother's attempts to find her, and the little psychic boy with his eerie visions, and the derelict lighthouse on the cliff, casting its menace over everything. Tim completed Shadows, but he knew that he would have to come back some time and try to make sense of the other novel. And that's what happened. Just as with River Boy, Tim posted the manuscript of Shadows off to his agent, returned to his computer, took a deep breath, and started to write. Storm Catchers is the result.

Tim's sixth novel is called Starseeker. It's quite a long book (about twice the length of all his other books) and it's about lots of different things. It's set in a village situated close to a large forest. One of the trees in the forest plays an important role in the story. There's a big musical theme running through the novel but the story actually starts with a gang of boys trying to break into a house. He had to write several drafts of this novel before he worked out exactly what it was that he was trying to say. It's about a boy called Luke who is desperately mixed up following his father's death two years earlier. He's a brilliant musician but in his distress over his father's bereavement he's fallen into bad company and is being steered into terrible danger. To make matters worse, he's becoming increasingly disturbed by strange psychic noises he keeps hearing day and night. It's a novel that works on several levels and covers several themes. It's about hope and healing and light. It's about music and the song of creation. It's about coming through grief and learning to love again. It's about a boy growing into manhood, growing into genius, growing into spirit. And it's about a tiny, unforgettable girl who will change his life forever.

Apocalypse is Tim's seventh novel. It's a big, meaty book with some pretty dark stuff in it, though there are tender moments, too. Kit and his parents are sailing their cruiser Windflower through unknown waters when they encounter a storm. But these things are nothing compared with what Kit sees in the water. The experience is so shocking it causes him to lose control of the boat. After a horrific accident, he finds himself marooned on an island with hostile inhabitants and separated from his parents. To make matters worse, a terrifying figure now emerges from the sea like a harbinger of doom. Apocalypse was a difficult book for Tim to write. It's a story that frightened him at first with its vision of crashing worlds and harsh, unyielding ideologies. Yet as he worked over the material, he came to realise that what he was trying to write was a book about love and redemption. There is pain and suffering in it but there is also hope and friendship and courage. On one level it's about a boy's desperate struggle to survive amid horrific circumstances. But on a deeper level it's about all of us, about our world and what we're doing to it.

Tim has also written two short, illustrated books. You don't have to read them in any particular order. They're independent ghost stories set in the West Country town of Totnes and they're illustrated by a fantastic artist called Jason Cockcroft. They are called Tales from the Dark Side. The first book is called Blood on Snow. The second is called Walking with the Dead. Tim really enjoyed writing these books. He loves Totnes and has always thought it would be a good place to make up stories about so this project was great fun.

His eighth novel is called Frozen Fire. It is another meaty book with some dark stuff. It centres on a fifteen-year-old girl called Dusty. She's feisty and independent but in a really bad state because the older brother she used to look up to has disappeared. He walked out of the house two years before the story starts without any explanation and has never been seen since. During those two years, Dusty's parents have also separated and her mother has walked out too, leaving her alone with her father. It's then that she receives the phone call late at night. A strange boy who is not her brother yet seems to know something about him - and about her. By the end of Chapter One, she's run out into the snow to face the first of several dangerous confrontations.

Since writing Frozen Fire, Tim has written the first three books in his new thriller series called BLADE. Book 1 is called Playing Dead, Book 2 is called Closing In and Book 3 is called Breaking Free. These are now in the shops. Running Scared (Book 4) will be published in April 2009 and Fighting Back (Book 5) in September 2009. Books 6, 7 and 8 will be published in January, April and September 2010. His ninth novel was also published in 2008. It is called Bloodchild.

In addition to the English-speaking countries, Tim's books are published in a large number of foreign-language editions including Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Danish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Lithuanian, Swedish, Turkish and others. For up-to-date information on foreign editions of particular books, please contact the Foreign Rights Department of Oxford University Press.