My background is in wildlife conservation, breeding rare species. I have a PhD from Glasgow University for my work on restoring the Chough to Cornwall and, thus, England. I was a Later Years Primary teacher and FE lecturer.

I have written and had published a dozen non-fiction natural history books and about 100 articles and papers. All published writings are listed here http://www.fire-raven.co.uk/bibliography.html.

I am also a passionate expressionist painter, see https://www.artfinder.com/artist/richard-meyer and write lyrical nature poems.

However being completely self-taught in my major disciplines, and leaving school with no qualifications, have been a stimulus but also a huge handicap; increasingly as I’ve got older, and since my last agent retired.

My fiction is for all ages but marked down as ‘juvenile’. The stories began when my children were small and I worked on them whenever I could alongside earning a living doing many jobs, including cinema projectionist, newspaper round, roadman etc. All my life experiences seem to be knitted together in these tales – which pretty much represent my entire life philosophy! I have now finished a quartet under the umbrella Omens & Havens. The ‘First Telling’ is called The Stone Throwers.

My Twitter account has about 1,500 Followers; I have sold nearly 200 paintings to many countries, particularly America. One English collector has amassed over 60. My writing has received accolades from Peter Scott, Michael Morpurgo, Michael Clark, Dominic Dyer, Phil Drabble, and Richard Mabey; I recently lectured on my book The Fate of the Badger at the Appledore Book Festival. Reviews are on the Fire-raven Writing website http://fire-raven.co.uk/thestonethrowers.html.