Hespira [Paperback]

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Nightshade Book
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597801038
• ISBN-13: 978-1597801034
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,178,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The name I answer to is Matt Hughes. I write fantasy and suspense fiction. To keep the two genres separate, I now use my full name, Matthew Hughes, for fantasy, and the shorter form for the crime stuff. I also write media tie-ins as Hugh Matthews. I am not Matt Hughes the mixed martial arts fighter, nor am I Matt Hughes the fantasy artist. I am not Dr. Matthew Hughes who writes serious works of military history.

I was born sixty-two years ago in Liverpool, England, but my family moved to Canada when I was five. I've made my living as a writer all of my adult life, first as a journalist, then as a staff speechwriter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and -- from 1979 until a few years back-- as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia. I am a former director of the Federation of British Columbia Writers and I used to belong to Mensa Canada, but these days I just write fiction.

I'm a university drop-out from a working poor background. Before getting into newspapers, I worked in a factory that made school desks, drove a grocery delivery truck, was night janitor in a GM dealership, and did a short stint as an orderly in a private mental hospital. As a teenager, I served a year as a volunteer with the Company of Young Canadians (something like VISTA in the US). I've been married to a very patient woman since the late 1960s, and I have three grown sons.

Over the past few years, I have taken up a secondary occupation -- that of an unpaid housesitter -- so that I can afford to keep on writing fiction yet still eat every day. These days, I'm in Italy but any snail-mail address of mine must be considered temporary; my permanent e-mail address is himself(-at-)archonate.com. I'm always interested to hear from people who've read my work.