Charles Davis was born and educated, and has travelled and worked. He now lives and writes. That has always seemed to me to be enough biography for any writer, but being an avid reader, too, I appreciate that curiosity demands a bit more, so . . .

Basically, middle-class boy born in the suburbs of London in 1960. Idyllic childhood brought to an abrupt end by being sent to boarding school aged 11, a fall from Eden that was a consequence of the fact that, within the state system, I had proved clever enough to spend my time clowning about at the back of the class and pass from year to year, but not clever enough to spend my time clowning about at the back of the class and pass any significant exams. An unhappy but privileged adolescence climaxed with the slightly timid decision that I wanted to write - 'timid' because I come from a largely unliterary family and, as I understood it, middle-class boys from the suburbs didn't write novels; I was none too clear who did, but fairly certain it wasn't people like me.

After a dissolute time at university, it occurred to me that if I wanted to write, I'd better get on and write something, so I sat down and, through my mid to late twenties, churned out a novel a year. I always found one publisher or another ready to read these outpourings, but since I never took the trouble to rewrite them, they were all rejected and rightly so.

At the same time, more or less by accident, I got a job teaching in Sudan. I spent a little over a year there, but decided to come back to Europe, partly because I feared I was 'turning native' and I was still very attached to family and home, partly because I acquired an interesting cocktail of obscure maladies that landed me in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, where the student doctors couldn't believe their good luck. But Sudan was significant for me in more ways than the mere aging of my internal organs, as it was there that I realized the world was my playground, that I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted, an epiphany for which I also have my family to thank since I don't believe it would have been possible without the background of love and security they had provided me.

Next job took me to Turkey, where I met Jeannette, a French maths teacher sixteen years older than me, a disparity in age that allowed us to become good friends before it occurred to either of us that we might actually make a couple. We've just celebrated our twentieth non-wedding anniversary. In the course of our time together, I have had the interesting experience of becoming a grandfather-in-common-law at the age of 34, and I’m now in the privileged position of having three grandchildren without having gone through the angst and expense of having children myself.

Jeannette wanted to go to South America, I wanted to go to China, so naturally we ended up in Ivory Coast. Spent two very happy years there, but seeing that the future of the country was looking dim and being unwilling to witness the sort of butchery then going on in Rwanda, we returned to Europe, settling in Barcelona, where we stayed for nine years.

It was at this time that I wrote my first serious novel, 'serious' in that I wrote it and rewrote it time and again, so much so that it eventually dominated five years of my life. My take on the Robin Hood myth, the manuscript must have had something of the zeitgeist in it, as I'd been at work on it for a year when I heard that two films were being made on the topic. The manuscript was picked out of the slush pile at Random House, I had a meeting with the editor, went through two rewrites, but eventually it was rejected, ostensibly because the paperback people felt they couldn't sell enough copies, though presumably had the editor of the hardback imprint liked it enough, he would have taken the risk.

Low moment there, following on from which I wrote a farce about modern Britain, which I took to a writers' workshop with Louis de Bernières. He liked the farce enough to lug it back to his agent, who liked it a little less, but did try to sell it. Publishers didn't like it at all, possibly with justification as, in retrospect, I realize some of my own disappointment had surfaced as bitterness. As an antidote, I wrote a book that was at once more positive and consciously deeper in its philosophical ambitions, The Tears of Hercules, a 900-page tome celebrating mountains and recounting the adventures of a band of misfits resisting the attempts of a bank to turn their Pyrenean valley into a private hunting reserve. Despite the sheer size of the thing, several publishers did read it, but the general conclusion was that it was too slow to get off the ground, the story only really taking off after 80 odd pages.

At the same time as I was writing this, Jeannette and I decided nine years was far too long in one place, even such a grand place as Barcelona, so we moved south to Andalusia. My teaching career had carried on fitfully throughout our travels and had generally been progressing in the right direction, but in Andalusia, the jobs I found were dismal. This time however, I was all too aware of the dangers of letting personal disappointment poison my writing, so I wrote my most upbeat book to-date, Walking The Dog, a series of magical-realist stories about an imaginary tropical island called Santa Margarita y Los Monjes, an avowedly warm book that went the rounds of publishers and agents, garnered plentiful praise, but not enough to make anyone put their money on the table.

At this point, on the advice of friends who were established writers, I put together a booklet of stories that I sent out to publishers and critics as a sort of calling card, and which brought me to the attention of The Permanent Press. My next novel, Displaced People, was a lightweight adventure yarn about expats and illegal immigrants in Southern Spain. Marty and Judith Shepard at The Permanent Press both read the book, but had enough misgivings to turn it down. At the time of writing (March 2009), I'm having a second look at it to decide whether it's worth rewriting or not.

In 2003, Jeannette managed to take early retirement. This seemed like a terribly good idea to me, so when the opportunity came up to combine the passions of walking and writing in a series of guidebooks, I grasped it with both boots. I’ve since published thirteen walking guides (mainly about Spain, mainly with Discovery Walking Guides) and an alternative ‘guide’ to Brittany, Jeannette’s birthplace, where we now live with two large and unfeasibly friendly dogs.

Busy with the guidebooks, I had no time for fiction and consequently built up a good head of frustrated steam. Come Winter of 2005, we were looking after the farm of some friends in the south of France: bitterly cold, mud everywhere, squalor untold, goats and sheep giving birth every time you turned a corner, foxes prowling, donkeys disgruntled etc. etc. but time enough to do one or two hours writing every morning and afternoon. Acutely aware that many people thought my previous novels too long, I resolved to write something short. The first draft of Walk On, Bright Boy was written in two weeks, hunched over the kitchen table, wearing an overcoat and fingerless mittens, a rather ineffective petrol heater wheezing toxic fumes into the atmosphere, a lamb leaping about at my feet (I'm not making this up), housebirds chirping in the background, cat coiled in a speculative manner on top of the canary cage, wildfowl pecking at the door . . . well, you get the picture. The time limit and discomfort seem to have done some good. The novel proved shorter than I had anticipated, so very short that I didn’t think it would justify a discrete publication, but I'd said what I wanted to say so I sent it off to The Permanent Press and they accepted it.

They have since published Walking The Dog and are due to bring out Standing At The Crossroads in 2011.