Biography

I’ve made a FREE short introductory film about my career and how it has been based around the world of reading and writing – in bookshops, libraries, book festivals and literacy charities. It is for classroom use in careers, English or PHSE lessons, aimed at people who might like a career in the book world.

My latest children’s historical novel is Resist which shines the light on the bravery of the Dutch Resistance in the Second World War through the eyes of the real childhood experience of Audrey Hepburn.

Find out more what I am currently writing here.

And here’s a brief introduction to my other books and what inspired me to write them:

I had quite a complicated childhood. I had three dads by the time I was 10. That’s probably why dad characters are really important in my books like Foul Play and the Football Academy series. A lot of children’s books keep parents out of the way, but I like to keep them close and write about the different kinds of dad you can have.

I am a dad now. I have one daughter. I get a lot of ideas for my books from things my daughter and I have done together. Making a model Spitfire with my daughter and telling her about what that plane did inspired me to come up with Spitfire, where a child goes back in time to fly a Spitfire in the Second World War.

Being a dad of a girl as well as meeting 10,000s of girls (and boys) in schools every year means that I know how important it is to have strong girl characters in my books. Secret FC is about two girls who start their own football team. Typhoon features two sisters who have to fly the RAF’s fastest plane. The Squad and Foul Play series have leading girl characters too.

I have always loved football. That’s why a lot of my books are set in the game. But I think football alone in a book can be a bit uninspiring, so I like to mix football with other genres: crime in Foul Play, spies in The Squad, ghosts in Defenders and Ghost Stadium and war in Over the Line.

One of my first jobs was working for the Royal National Institute for the Blind. My job was to record books for blind students to listen to. Blind characters are rare in books. That’s why I made Danny’s dad in Foul Play blind. I wanted Danny to read books with his dad. Danny’s dad loves crime fiction. That’s how Danny knows about how crimes are solved in crime fiction. He’s read dozens of them to his dad.

I had several other jobs before I was an author. I was a milkman. I worked in a warehouse. One of my favourite jobs was working in bookshops. I worked for Waterstone’s and in 1997 I won the Bookseller of the Year Award.

I spent several years working for libraries. My job was to put on author talks and book promotions. That’s why I love having scenes set in libraries in my books. You can find library scenes in Boys United and several others.

I struggled with reading when I was young. I didn’t have the stamina to read long books. My mum got me reading newspapers and magazines about football to build my reading up. I liked them: they were about what I was interested in. Football.

Football is a rich game. That means that criminals are attracted to it. I wrote Foul Play so that its main characters, Danny and Charlotte, could defeat criminals in football. They take on ex-players burgling old teammates houses (Killer Pass), football agents who are making slaves of young African footballers (Off Side) and more.

I like rugby too. Being from Leeds I am into rugby league. I’ve done five rugby league books about fans and players. The full list is Scrum, What’s a Bear to Wear, Interchange, The Last Try and Haka Boy.

More recently I’ve become a big rugby union fan too. My daughter and I have season tickets at Yorkshire Carnegie and we go to watch England. My Rugby Academy series came about once we started to enjoy watching live rugby union.

I like to travel to new places to write my books. When I was writing the Rugby Academy books we took family holidays in Toulon and New Zealand so that I could combine finding out what I needed to know with a holiday. Surface to Air is set in Toulon and Deadlocked in Auckland.

I love setting books in other countries. It’s a great way of travelling the world. I’ve set books in the Arctic (White Fear), Ghana (Off Side), Russia (Dead Ball), Poland (Black Op and The Real Thing), Italy (Own Goal), New Zealand (Deadlocked) and several in France.

I met my wife in the Sahara Desert. We had our first conversations in the vast open spaces of the daytime and night time desert. It was one of the best weeks of my life and an experience I’ll never forget. That’s why I set the beginning of Black Op in the desert.

I try to have new experiences that I can put in my books. When I needed to write about three boys camping in an abandoned haunted football stadium for Ghost Stadium I went to camp in a football stadium all night on my own. So I knew what it felt like and could describe how it sounded, looked and felt.

It wasn’t that scary on the football stadium all night. To make the book more frightening I drew on an experience I remembered from when I was 20, when a friend of mine thought she was being haunted. And so did I.

Many of my books feature forces families, particularly the Royal Air Force. That came from me working with the RAF Museums, where I am the writer in residence. They helped me write the Wings series. And children at schools with forces families helped me understand what it is like to have parents in the forces for the Rugby Academy books.

Several of my books are set in wars. Spitfire is about a boy who goes back in time to fly a Spitfire in the Second World War. Flyboy about a boy who flies a Sopwith Camel in the First World War. I like writing about war because I want to try to understand how people can be so brave when such terrible things are happening.

I have written two books set in the trenches of the First World War. More than any place those battlefields are the hardest to imagine. Visiting the trenches and museums as well as reading first-hand account of trench warfare helped me do my best when writing Over the Line and The Last Try. Because of that Over the Line is the book I am most proud of writing.

The other book that I am most proud of is Off Side. It is about fair trade. That means making sure people who make things for us are paid properly. I went to Ghana in Africa with Divine Chocolate to visit fair trade cocoa bean farms. I learned a lot and I hope that comes through in the book.

Watching and reading the Last Kingdom series became a bit of an obsession and led me to read history stories by authors like Bernard Cornwell and Rosemary Sutcliff. They blend believable history with spectacular stories. It made me want to write my own. Historical research and visiting British & Irish historical sites inspired my new Defenders series: Anglo Saxon / Viking in Killing Ground. Romans in Dark Arena. Iron Age in Pitch Invasion.

When I’m not working, spending time with my family or watching live sport, my favourite hobby is fell running. I’ve written a children’s book about that too, Armistice Runner.

Although I struggled with reading when I was a child, one thing I did enjoy reading was the Roy of the Rovers comics. That’s why I was thrilled when Rebellion asked me to write their Roy of the Rovers novels for children.

And I am incredibly proud of the Rocky of the Rovers books which give Roy’s younger sister Rocky her own adventures off on and on the pitch.

In 2018 my family got a dog. He’s called Finn. Within weeks I was writing him into one of my books, D-Day Dog. It just confirms for me that we should write about what we love. And what we are interested in.

I was extremely grateful to have the kind support of key witnesses, Trevor Avery and the Lake District Holocaust Project and hundreds of teachers and pupils to make sure After the War accurately and appropriately tells of how three hundred children arrived in the English Lake District, having survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. They’ve finally reached a place of safety and peace, where they can hopefully begin to recover.

Having written books about the Army (Over the Line, The Last Try) and RAF (Flyboy, Spitfire, Typhoon and Rugby Academy), I was keen to write a naval story. Rooted in the real-life story of the Arctic convoys, Arctic Star was researched with the generous support of HMS Belfast and the Imperial War Museum and the Russian Arctic Convoy Exhibition.

In 2023, I am thrilled to be writing more books about Rocky Race, the sister of Roy of the Rovers. To be honest writing Rocky is a lot more fun. Roy was a fixed character based on the 1950s to 1990s comic book hero and I had to make him like the character he was before. Rocky – on the other hand – was my idea – a footballing sister for Roy. She had grown and grown as I wrote the Roy books and no has her own spin off series. I’m loving seeing her flourish as a footballer and as a British girl playing football on the USA.

As a big fan of the Ultimate Football Heroes books, I was delighted when the publisher asked me to do a book in that series about the great events in football, Football’s Greatest Moments. It’s all about those memorable moments in the women’s and men’s games. Some you’ll agree with. Others you won’t. It was a lot of fun putting it together. I did loads of research and asked several friends what they thought should and shouldn’t be in there.

Powerpoint

A quick introduction to me and my books. Download here.

More literacy resources here.

Buy Books

Signed and dedicated copies of all my books are available personalised to order from my local independent children’s bookshop “The Thoughtful Spot” here.