C.M. Gray

I was born in England and spent most of my youth growing up in the Essex countryside. It’s a beautiful part of England, up near the Suffolk border, but I was born with a heavy dose of 'travel lust' so as soon as I could get a passport and adventure the world, I packed a rucksack and went exploring!

It was a bit of a risk and my parents weren’t too taken with the idea, but I’m still travelling and have been lucky enough to live and travel in loads of countries all over the world. In fact, I’ve now lived for more years outside of England than I ever spent living there – It is, after all, a great big exciting world!

I’ve worked and trained as a carpenter, and then a house restorer… I’ve picked loads of different types of fruit - from grapes in France to avocados in Israel. I travelled with the Bedouin in the Sanai desert for several months and even did a stint as a stock broker in Hong Kong. I’ve called Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayan Mountains home, and then moved on and loved the clamour of central Hong Kong, it’s been a ride and a blast.

In my later years, I came back to Europe and restored an old farmhouse in deep rural Burgundy, dallied in Amsterdam for a number of years, and then came south in search of the sun again. I’ve always vowed to return and sink some roots back in English soil... but I haven’t got there yet, maybe someday, there are just so many interesting places out there. I do live a little closer to England now, just outside of Barcelona, Spain in the middle of the forest with my dogs and two wonderful children, it’s a great place to write.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, my writing is mostly fantasy and many of my experiences in Asia, India, Africa and the Middle East come to life in my writing. I’ve seen and done some pretty strange things on my travels and bumped into some incredible characters, so writing fantasy is almost like writing fact for me… sort of. When I started writing Shadowland, I had the intention that there would be no fantasy in it at all, but then came the druids and then one of the main characters, Cal found he had a pretty strange affinity with wolves, so my historical fiction became historical fantasy… but it’s made it a very popular book!