Jon Rosenberg

Born in London, too late to be a flower child but too early to take Gordon Gecko as a inspiration, I stumbled across three continents without ever discerning a guiding philosophy. As a child my parents seemed to think that anywhere that was synonymous with backwater, inbred, hill-billy jokes sounded just about right, so as a family we discovered the wild splendours of West Virginia, the Llyn Peninsula and the far north of the Scottish Highlands. Even though a succession of teachers had suggested that I was not particularly academically inclined (and some considered me not merely profoundly dyslexic but a visible drag to the potential of the whole human race) I studied Electrical Engineering, English Literature and American Studies, Shakespeare Studies and Law, in locales diverse as Edinburgh, Hull, Stratford and Singapore. 

In a final attempt to escape any form of actual work I took up writing. Only to discover that it was far more demanding than any job I'd ever had and more addictive than morphine. Clumsy, to the point of tripping over single blades of grass, I took up Tai Chi in an effort to discover outer balance and it worked, these days there need to be at least three blades within a square inch before I land face first in the dirt. 

I live in a tiny village somewhere in Shropshire, usually with one or more insane cats. All of whom considered my writing as a treasonous waste of time that should, by all rights, be spent seeing to their needs. I've long since been obsessed by narrative forms, be it novels, films, plays, or, for that matter, comic books. So, despite the incessant nagging of the cats, I'm happiest sat at my computer banging out sentences, considering character and plot details and discovering what happens next. I'm the author of the Hidden Academy series which so far comprises the three novels: The Unicorn Crisis; The Digital Wolf and Pantheon of the Dead. I hope to keep adding to this list at regular intervals. Currently I'm working on a fourth book in the series with the working title: Mithraic Mystery, which has Ash confronting the most ruthlessly ambitious forces of the Roman Empire. 

The idea for the first novel (Unicorn) came to me as a joke, a joke which became a skit and then a short story. By the time I had written the novel I found that the joke no longer suited the book which Unicorn had become. I hope one day to finish the original joke as a short story set in the world of The Hidden Academy. It's likely that I'll find the room within the overall narrative structure as The Hidden Academy, as a project is likely to be extended to ten novels.