Paul Ashford has walked this earth for a good few decades although at the start he mostly crawled. He was brought up under idyllic conditions in the Surrey Hills and failed to undergo any of the suffering now obligatory for a modern novelist. He began producing fiction at an early age, mostly in the form of excuses for not doing his homework.

He received a degree in Philosophy from a university which kept Philip Larkin stashed in its library, and then changed his mind and got his doctorate in Psychology from another one.

All this learning was insufficient to prevent Paul from becoming employed in the media, and he was embroiled in innumerable titles including being a director of Channel 5 and the Express Group. Since making up fairy tales was incompatible with the rigorously factual approach of the British press, his first novel, Caryddwen’s Cauldron, appeared under the name of Paul Hilton.

Paul continues to work on new stories. When not doing this he plays a number of instruments, most of them badly, and has a small boat which he sails extensively and largely alone due to the fear of drowning that his past exploits elicit in passengers.