I was born in Glasgow in 1959 and although throughout my life I have lived in most parts of Scotland I have found myself continually drawn back to the "friendly city" where I now live quietly on the outskirts with my wife.

I am the author of four novels, a collection of short stories, two plays and a large body of poetry.

The sixties

Neither of my parents had any interest in writing. They had precious little interest in reading but they never went as far as to actively discourage their children. We all grew up on a steady diet of Enid Blyton. My father did however have a passion for self-help books however: how to improve your memory, how to speed read, the classic How to Win Friends and Influence People and — incongruously — a course in kung fu, long before the TV series made it popular.

I received a solid Scottish education which at the time included the belt and lessons in grammar neither of which has done me any permanent harm. I was a natural student, learned by osmosis and excelled in most academic subjects; the less said about the physical and practical the better.

My interest in writing can be traced back to the Burns poetry I was force-fed as a child, in fact the first poem I ever wrote — sadly now lost — was a macabre piece about a man waiting to be hanged written in Scots at the tender age of nine.

The seventies

It was not until well into my secondary education that the idea of being a writer started to make sense to me and if one wanted to seek out a particular moment of epiphany then it would be the day Mr Bleaney by Philip Larkin was explained to me. Of course, this was not the first time our class had had a poem broken down, the week before it had been Browning's My Last Duchess, but Larkin's poem was different: it posed a question without having any answer. This was a revelation. All I had at this time, like all boys my age, were questions. Years of pretty bad poetry asking quite good questions, followed.

At nineteen the next piece of the puzzle slipped into place: I discovered the American poet William Carlos Williams whose simple and direct style of poetry appealed to me immensely. I am especially grateful to Tom Leonard for his article discussing Williams's poem The Locust Tree in Flower. At about this time I also discovered Beckett and am similarly grateful to the Open University for that, though it was years before I fully appreciated him. It was shortly after this that I decided to tackle something other than poetry, a one act — and not particularly absurd — play, The Normalpath, about a burnt out civil servant who gets talked out of killing himself by a young clerical assistant.

The eighties

When I was twenty-one my daughter was born and, perhaps not surprisingly, a children's book appeared, H M Mole, but with the breakup of my marriage she was eighteen before I ever got round to reading it to her.

Then followed the wilderness years. I still wrote poetry on occasion but lost interest in trying to get it into print. I moved back home and tried to fit in, to be what the people around me expected. Writing became little more than a hobby and eventually dried up completely. No one even noticed its passing.

The nineties

Writing is a form of release and there are stories aplenty of how self-destructive writers can be even when they are writing. After ten years I had had enough. I was becoming increasingly impossible to live with and when an opportunity came to escape I did. Suddenly I had time, a lot of time on my hands. In the autumn of 1993 I began reading again. One of the first books I came across was Patrick Suskind's odd little book, The Pigeon. I never finished it but the image of the bank security guard, Jonathan Noel, who, after spending thirty years protecting himself from people and events, suddenly has his world turned upside down by an encounter with a glaring pigeon, fixed itself in my head. Within a few short weeks I had the draft of a novel completed.

The few friends and workmates (and a couple of total strangers) that got the chance to read it confirmed two things to me: a) I could write and b) I'd not written nearly enough — people wanted to know more. So two things happened, I started to expand the book, adding a second day and, much to my own surprise and as quickly as I'd drafted my first novel, Living with the Truth, I wrote a second, Stranger than Fiction. It would take six years to finish the two of them. I completed my first novel in February 1998 and the sequel in July 2000.

The noughties

By July 2000 the whole world had changed. Home computers were now relatively commonplace and the Internet was growing. Like millions of others, I logged on and found, in my own word, "Home." After thirty-odd years surrounded by people who had little or no interest in any form of literature I now had access to a world full of people who regarded writing as normal, desirable even.

Tentatively I made a start on the "difficult" third novel and it was. I was keen not to write another Living with the Truth but found myself writing a character who could easily have been Jonathan Payne twenty years younger. The book stalled and I suspected that was it. And it was for a while. On the top deck of a No 44 bus in the centre of Glasgow one day I started to write down a list, firstly, the five senses and then others, a sense of honour, a sense of place, a sense of urgency and so on. Over the next few weeks I churned out almost fifty short-stories each one revolving around one of these senses. I called the collection, Making Sense.

At the same time I wrote the dramatic monologue Living Will for my daughter, who, at the time, was showing an interest in the theatre.

Then one day I saw how I could complete my novel. It had been left on a cliff-hanger but rather than tackle the events of the next day or week I jumped twenty years into the future and then another twenty. The first section of the book was in third person; the second two were in the first person and then the final section, where we find out what exactly has happened to the man, is in dialogue. This book was my Ulysses. Whereas Jonathan Payne got to discover things about himself, Jim Valentine got to experience a different life which he tried to force back into the shape of his old one. I completed the book, entitled The More Things Change, in March 2003.

The More Things Change was a novel intrinsically tied up in Beckett's world. Days, literally, after finishing the novel I sat down and wrote a short radio play, Vladimir and Estragon are Dead. It took a week to write.

After the enourmous effort that it had taken to complete The More Things Change I suspected that it would be a long time before I got an idea for a new book. It wasn't. Within a few weeks I had begun Milligan and Murphy. This fourth novel proved quite different to the others in that I wrote the final chapter after completing the first and then filled in the journey. It was completed in August 2005.

My current project is provisionally entitled Left and is the story of a middle-aged woman who has to return home to clear out her late father's house only to find she never knew herself, let alone her father, nearly as much as she though she did. After a year I scrapped my first 10000 words as too light and began again. As of November 2007 I had written 17000 words that I was happy with but at this time I did begin a period of intense poetry writing.