Murray Davies was born in South Wales in 1947. After an MA in First World War poetry, he drifted into journalism and spent more than twenty years on Fleet Street as a hard news reporter and a feature writer on three national newspapers. Murray covered a wide spectrum of major stories and he has filed from more than 30 countries in a prolific career: the civil war in Angola, famine in Ethiopia, mercenaries in Zaire, an orphanage in Bangladesh, the conflict in Bosnia... He claims to be the only Western journalist to have visited a condemned man on Russia's Death Row. Domestically, he reported on most major disasters, including the Herald of Free Enterprise, Lockerbie and Hillsborough. He has also reported major crime and court cases. Murray gave up a staff job four years ago to write full time. He lives in Greenwich but has a place in Wiltshire where he retreats as often as he can to write fiction