Roger Noble

My formative years led me to spending my twenties living on a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee. That’s where I really started writing - though I thought of it as a quirk.

When I moved to Jerusalem, I studied Psychology, and worked in a Language School - in what was then a very mixed city I met a huge crowd of different characters. Writing then was a sort of record keeping activity.

Back in England in my thirties, I trained as a clinical psychologist, I got married and had kids - and remembered the good old days. Writing was an avoidance activity.

In Brighton, working with people with Learning Disabilties, writing was a way of expressing my anger.

When I wrote a D.Phil thesis on Logic Programming, writing was a displacement activity.

Dragged back into Clinical Psychology, in an increasingly chaotic and shrinking NHS, I began to realise that I was actually a writer.

So recognising that fact, I’ve cut my losses, and enrolled on the National Academy of Writing Diploma course. The only problem - it’s in Birmingham (that’s a distance problem you understand - Brum is a great place with an underrated reputation and overrated canals).