Welcome
Every year swallows fly between the Scottish isles and Africa. These migratory birds can call both places home. Curlew cry and hyena whoop, howling Atlantic gale and tropical thunderclap – these are the sounds in their lives.
My childhood was spent in the northern Scottish islands, yet I have lived in the Ethiopian Highlands for 20 years. I too can call both places home, and I know their sounds well. After decades spent running charitable projects and social enterprises in northern Ethiopia, illness prompted a change and I am currently in Scotland, training as a writer and drawing on my experiences of islands and highlands for my work. I aspire in due course to follow the sensible swallows: summers in the north, winters in the south.
This website is having a major overhaul, so please excuse glitches. I have removed my blog and many old news items. After I’ve done a considerable amount of work on these, they will be available as ebooks to purchase. Some blog anecdotes may appear in my memoir of Ethiopia, a work in progress that I hope will be published as a print book.
Thank you for coming to my website. Do enjoy your visit, and drop by again soon.
My childhood was spent in the northern Scottish islands, yet I have lived in the Ethiopian Highlands for 20 years. I too can call both places home, and I know their sounds well. After decades spent running charitable projects and social enterprises in northern Ethiopia, illness prompted a change and I am currently in Scotland, training as a writer and drawing on my experiences of islands and highlands for my work. I aspire in due course to follow the sensible swallows: summers in the north, winters in the south.
This website is having a major overhaul, so please excuse glitches. I have removed my blog and many old news items. After I’ve done a considerable amount of work on these, they will be available as ebooks to purchase. Some blog anecdotes may appear in my memoir of Ethiopia, a work in progress that I hope will be published as a print book.
Thank you for coming to my website. Do enjoy your visit, and drop by again soon.
My writing training has been through distance learning at university level: I graduated with a BA in Creative Writing in 2021. In fiction, my particular interest is in writing historical novels for children. I am currently doing a Master's in Viking Studies (medieval history), so progress on my own writing projects remains slow at present, despite the wealth of material I have on file.
Empress Mentewab School had to close temporarily but I am continuing to collect funds in anticipation of the day I can register a new intake of infants. Until I write a bestseller, the non-profit school relies on donations, the rural families it serves being too poor to pay fees. Please help me have sufficient funds ready so that, now the covid pandemic and Tigray War have passed, the school can re-open and be financially secure.