Peter Crawley
Born in Chiswick in 1956, Peter was brought up on the North Downs in Surrey. In academic education, he was encouraged to study physics and applied mathematics, yet found his feet in social, political and economic geography. Post school, he studied at the Goethe Institut in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, West Germany and worked as a translator. Returning to the UK, Peter made his home the Potter's Shop in Shere, writing novels while selling pots and sleeping in the office. He worked variously as a pig farmer, barman, moss-gatherer, builder's and roofer's mate, French and maths teacher, driver, guide and car cleaner. In the summer of '77, he hitch-hiked to the South of France, sleeping rough among other itinerants on the rocks of the Old Port, taking day-work painting and varnishing. He later signed up to crew a luxury yacht and at season's end sailed a 50-foot ketch to the West Indies. In 2011 he returned to writing and has published five novels, a collection of short stories and a novella.
Locational Fiction
Mazzeri, Ontreto, The Truth In Fiction, Boarding House Reach, The Wind Between Two Worlds, Constant Tides, Tre Donne di Messina, and What You Don't Know About Me.
Mazzeri tells the story of a former serviceman who travels to Corsica in search of his forebears and falls in love with a local woman. Ontreto, set in the Aeolian Islands to the north of Sicily, finds the same character caught in a web of intrigue involving an ageing star of Italian cinema, a politician and a local sailmaker. In Boarding House Reach, five characters pass the weekend in a bed-and-breakfast on the Norfolk coast; however, their lives are complicated and each has come to The Reach to find absolution and, perhaps, redemption. The Wind Between Two Worlds is the prequel to Mazzeri in which a young journalist investigates the death of a rough sleeper and in doing so stumbles across the relationship between a refugee from Iraq and the former serviceman. The Truth In Fiction is a collection of short stories about people and places as diverse as the pilgrimage of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain, the lakes of Central Otago in the South Island of New Zealand, the shores of the Cotes d'Azur, and the harbours of the West Indies. Constant Tides, also translated into Italian as Tre Donne di Messina, is a three-part novel set in the Straight of Messina which follows the lives of two families from the Great Earthquake of 1908, through the Second World War and on to the present. Also available in Audiobook. What you Don't Know About Me, a novella, involves a young clandestine refugee who travels to the UK hoping to find a girl he knew in his hometown in Zimbabwe.
