Location: United Kingdom
Member Since:
Oct. 14, 2014
Edward James
Biography
Edward James is rather like his hero, the Tudor chronicler Richard Hakluyt; neither of them went to sea and both were fascinated by ships and seafaring from a young age. Edward blames it on growing up beside the Thames in the days when the big ships still came up river to the Royal Docks.
After taking a history degree at Oxford Edward became first of all a university lecturer in Britain and America teaching social policy and then a civil servant in what is now the Department of Work and Pensions in London. After a stint at the European Commission in Brussels he moved on to become an independent consultant on social security to governments as diverse as Russia, Kyrghystan and Albania. On retiring to Cheltenham he went back to history as a Review Editor for the Historical Novel Society and to writing about ships and the sea in the Age of Discovery. You can find more about him, including a selection of his short stories and interviews on his blog http://busywords.wordpress.com/.
His inspiration is Hakluyt's Principal Navigations of the English Nation, a work of several volumes based largely on interviews with seafarers fresh from their voyages. In Freedom' Pilgrim and The Frozen Dream he retells two of Hakluyt's most dramatic stories, telling the things Hakluyt did not dare to tell.
After taking a history degree at Oxford Edward became first of all a university lecturer in Britain and America teaching social policy and then a civil servant in what is now the Department of Work and Pensions in London. After a stint at the European Commission in Brussels he moved on to become an independent consultant on social security to governments as diverse as Russia, Kyrghystan and Albania. On retiring to Cheltenham he went back to history as a Review Editor for the Historical Novel Society and to writing about ships and the sea in the Age of Discovery. You can find more about him, including a selection of his short stories and interviews on his blog http://busywords.wordpress.com/.
His inspiration is Hakluyt's Principal Navigations of the English Nation, a work of several volumes based largely on interviews with seafarers fresh from their voyages. In Freedom' Pilgrim and The Frozen Dream he retells two of Hakluyt's most dramatic stories, telling the things Hakluyt did not dare to tell.