The picture to the left shows me at my most lovely. It comes from a poster (see the opening slideshow) popular in Athena in the 1980s, which has been removed from circulation for obvious reasons. I wish I were also the baby being cradled by the heavily-muscled man, or the tennis player scratching her bottom, but I am neither. I spent most of my childhood (just) on a hill farm in Radnorshire, which looked a lot like Penllan in The Claude Glass, and caused me to fall in love with Wales, hills, castles, birds of prey and How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban. In later years, I lived on a strawberry farm near the Malvern Hills in Herefordshire, which had a castle of its own and complimentary strawberries. In later years still, I lived near the postcard-friendly book town of Hay-on-Wye, where I can still be found from time to time. These days, I live in a remote and inconvenient house in the Cambrian Mountains, near the Elan Valley reservoirs, where I write bits of journalism, help to sell t-shirts and devote as much time as possible to writing. The house sits above the most beautiful valley in Wales (views also on the opening slideshow). Hay Bluff is visible from the kitchen window, thirty miles away, and the sun rises spectacularly over an invisible England almost every morning. I run a laptop off tractor batteries and/or a horrific old generator which prefers not to work in cold weather. In the immediate area, you can normally find red kites, peregrines, hen harriers, woodcocks and dippers. I am married to Charlie. You can find her here: www.tonictshirts.com. Aside from her, I have two main passions. One is African music. Here are some tracks I recommend: Thomas Mapfumo - "Muramba Doro" from Chamunorwa (vinyl only) Fela Kuti - "Lady" from Shakara Super Mama Djombo - "Dissan Na M'bera" from Super Mama Djombo Papa Wemba - "Perdu De Vie (Auguisha)" from Pole Position Le Rail Band feat. Mory Kante - "Jirikan" from Classic Titles Bembeya Jazz National - "Armée Guinéenne" from The Syliphone Years Daara J - "Magg Dan" from Boomerang Cheikh Lô feat. Oumou Sangaré - "Bambay Gueej" from Bambay Gueej Busi Mhlongo - "Yehlisan'umoya Ma-Afrika" from Urbanzulu Toumani Diabaté’s Symmetric Orchestra - "Africa Challenge" from Boulevard de l’Independance Oliver Mtukudzi - "Gunguwo" from Ndipeiwo Zano Hallelujah Chicken Run Band - "Chaminuka Mukuru" from Take One The other is writing, which I do very painstakingly and with mighty amounts of research. Increasingly, I am co-opting elements from folk tales and the sort of stories you hear in mid-Wales, such as one I heard last week in which my neighour received a foot massage from a ghost. For those interested, I am working on four different books at the moment, which should see the light of day sometime. The first is Ibo. The second is The Red Jacket, which involves Welsh hill farmers, homosexuality and a distant debt to The Fair at Sorochintsy by Nikolai Gogol, who writes of the devil's coat that "the red of it glowed like fire, so that one could not take one’s eyes off it!" The third is a novel based on the life of 19th-century Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the 1965 flight of Voskhod 2, during which Aleksei Leonov and Pavel Belyayev went from performing the first-ever space-walk to fighting off wolves in the Ural Mountains. The fourth is a children's book about mist, a pig, a boat, an asteroid, a mynah bird, the Silurian era, the lost kingdom of Ys, the trans-Siberian express and the Psilli of the Sahara, who once declared war against the wind.