I grew up the youngest of three in a family of teachers and professional athletes, the kind of household where books competed with the outdoors. The books usually won. Born in a small town in Poland, I left home at sixteen with a scholarship to a boarding school in Edinburgh, alone, knowing nobody, with barely a word of the language. I stayed, studied medicine in Glasgow, and made Scotland my second home.

 

That experience of being an outsider in an unfamiliar world shaped much of how I write: characters navigating places they don't belong, earning trust the hard way, finding home where they least expect it.

 

I became a GP, drawn to the old-fashioned idea of what a doctor should be: home visits, knowing your patients by name, caring for families across generations. Medicine shaped my writing more than I expected. The good, the bad and everything people don't say out loud.

 

I live in Dumfries, Scotland with my wife, a Doberman called Brooklyn and two cats: Sir Charles Lickens and Madame Marie Purrie.

 

I write mostly at night, fuelled by coffee and stubbornness.