About

  Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was given to me by my paternal American great uncle who “did not want any of his relations growing up like Barbarians not knowing the greatest author of all”. It was an icy winter morning in an industrial town near Johannesburg in South Africa when I started reading this book at the great age of one week before my ninth birthday.

  This opened up a world that was heaven to me. Identifying with Pip, who was “brought up by hand”, just as I was, it was the beginning of a life long love for all of Dickens’s work as well as literature. In different towns I would charge for the nearest library, and lose myself there in now forgotten worlds from Charles Lamb to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to JM Keynes to great trials, or to any book that happened to appear on the same or nearby shelf.

  Later I was involved in various businesses from multi-nationals to accounting firms. In my own time I taught catechetics to children who showed me the futility of underestimating them ever. These watchful eyes opened me to the wonder of life which I have never lost.

  The chaos of my marriage to a psychopath led to decades of terror, not mitigated or helped by the laws of the land. These experiences have taught me to shout out any horror of the current injustice facing people. These are the bases of my writing informed, I hope, by justice, and mercy.