Category:W Scott Beaven

I was born in Glasgow but brought up and went to school in South Shields, by the coast in North-east England. When I was sixteen, I left school and returned to Glasgow where I worked as a trainee [sweeping floors; packing boxes] for a Builders Hardware Merchant called George Boyd &Co. I lived on the infamous Easterhouse Housing Estate where people really did throw dogs [and babies] out of the 18th floor window when they demanded too much attention.

After Ann Corner broke my heart I put my career such as it was on hold and went travelling. Firstly around the coast of Britain; up the east coast, across to the island of Orkney, then south via the Inner and Outer Hebrides, Ayreshire; Cumbria, Lancashire; the West country and then back North past Kings Lynn, Hull and then home. I worked in a variety of sales roles to pay for this. Then I travelled overland through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan [you could cross then], Pakistan, India and then North to Nepal and Kathmandu. I worked in London after that as a salesman then returned to the North-east where I started up on my own working from the kitchen table [as you do] and using the garage as stores. By this time I had met and married Barbara and we had a daughter, Jane. The business grew quite quickly and I soon moved out of the kitchen to an Industrial Unit in Gateshead.

The business thrived and turnover peaked at around £1.4m in 2001. I was still passionate about travelling and was able to take two or three holidays a year touring Japan, North Africa, Borneo and Malaysia, China and many other parts of the world. In the nineties we went to the USA every summer every year for ten years, criss-crossing the continent by road, bus and plane.

I took early retirement in 2010, hoping to spend six months of the year in our lovely restored house on the Adriatic coast of Italy. At that point we owned three houses, [two with swimming pools] but the crash of 2008 caught up with us and we had to sell the houses and pull in our ambitions.

I took a part-time course in Creative Writing in early 2011 and discovered I could write dialogue; a talent I never knew I had and would not have found in myself had I not gone on the course. My mother became unwell and unable to take care of herself around that time and then died in late April of that year. Then my elderly father became very dependent and needed a lot of care. That was when I sat down and wrote RICCARTON JUNCTION and then quickly followed that with TRAIN THAT CARRIED THE GIRL. Neither book concerns elderly parents or coping with death but it was a very intense time and I think the discipline of writing helped me to cope with the experience. TRAIN THAT CARRIED THE GIRL is a particularly dark and intense novel. My dad died in his sleep, in January this year.

I am not currently writing anything. I have a few ideas about the next phase of Kikarin’s life but I am so absorbed in selling, promoting and trying to raise awareness of my first two books that those ideas will have to wait.

I am still happily married to Barbara, and Jane and her husband Phil live 15 minutes away from us.

We no longer travel.

01 May 2014