About the Author

Simon Rae is a poet, prose writer and broadcaster. For many years he wrote topical poems for the Guardian and was for a time presenter of Radio 4's Poetry Please! In 1998 he published the definitive biography of W.G. Grace. He won the National Poetry Competition in 1999. His most recent collection of poems is Gift Horses (Enitharmon, 2006). Other books include It's Not Cricket (Faber, 2001) and the children's novels, Unplayable (Top Edge Press, 2009), Keras (David Fickling Books, 2013), and Medusa's Butterfly (Corgi, 2014). He taught a creative writing evening class at Cherwell College, Oxford, led an informal writing group for a number of years, and had two stints as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, at Warwick University and Oxford Brookes. He lives near the Cotswalds market town of Chipping Norton.