Mark Patton

I'm an islander! I grew up on Jersey, in the Channel Islands. Like most Jerseymen of my generation, I learned to swim at the same time as I learned to walk, and the sea played a big part in my upbringing. I did a great deal of swimming, sailing and scuba-diving. The protagonist of my first novel is himself a Jerseyman, and I think my love of the sea, and of the island landscape and it's flora and fauna are all there in the novel.

I was good at English at school and, as a teenager, I wrote poems for my girlfriends. John Donne and Shakespeare were the inspiration for many of them, although I never soared to anything like their quality. As a student at Cambridge, I discovered that I was actually much better at writing prose than poetry. My girlfriend was typing the final draft of my first published book, "Jersey in Prehistory" (still in print, I think, though somewhat out of date) as I was revising for my finals.