Alex Shearer
Alex Shearer started his writing career as a scriptwriter and has had great success in that field. His credits include The Two of Us, the 1990s sitcom starring Nicholas Lyndhurst. More recently he has started writing for children. His Wilmot stories have been adapted for TV by Yorkshire television, and his children's novel, The Greatest Store in the World, was screened as a feature length TV film on Christmas Eve 1999 by the BBC. Alex's recent novel 'The Speed of the Dark' was shortlisted for the 2002 Guardian Fiction Prize
Alex Shearer lives with his family in Somerset. He has written more than a dozen books for both adults and children, as well as many successful television series, films, and stage and radio plays. He has had over thirty different jobs, and has never given up trying to play the guitar.
“Mrs Chadwick used to say the same about my English, about going round the houses. But to be honest, I like going round the houses. And as for beginning at the beginning, the reason I never start there is that I don’t know where the beginning is, and that’s the honest truth. And anyway, I’ve never known anything in my whole life that ever started at the beginning. Things aren’t like that. They usually start about halfway through, or near the end, and then work their way backwards, that’s how must things are.”
“Blood is thicker than water, as people say. (But then again so is ketchup.)”
“Time can do all sorts of things. It’s almost like a magician. It can turn autumn into spring and babies into children, seeds into flowers and tadpoles into frogs, caterpillars into cocoons, and cocoons into butterflies. And life into death. There’s nothing that time can’t do. Except run backwards. That’s its trouble really, it can only go one way.”