SJA Turney biography
Biography reproduced with the kind permission of the author - www.sjaturney.co.uk.
I’m a thirty-mumble-mumble year old child living in God’s own country of North Yorkshire. Educated (if you can call it that) at a Grammar School in the days of corporal punishment and uniforms (not the latex nurse variety either.) Went to Teesside Polytechnic (as it was then) to study computing and took almost a year to realise that I was mathematically inept and unable to add small numbers of beans. Actually that’s not true. My mental arithmetic is pretty damn good, just don’t ask me to divide them by ‘x’ or take a median. There ends my mathematical ability. They tried to teach me about ’sin’ ‘cos’ and ‘tan’ but I retain the belief that they mean ‘naughty thoughts’ ‘island off Greece’ and ‘possible skin cancer’.
My next step was to go to Keele University to study Classical History. I enjoyed it and it’s definitely my forte, though I did spend most of my time studying both ‘Marlboro’ and ‘Famous Grouse’ rather more closely than Aeschylus. Consequently I never finished that degree.
After this I went through a tremendous and motley collection of jobs, including data entry, carrying paint pots, validating sheep claims, selling job lots of cars, maintaining insurance policies, I.T. Management and now software engineering (all with intermittent bar-work and paintball marshalling.) I am in fact ‘career-confused’.
Hence the urge to write (which has kept me blogging for four years) and the urge to study more Classical history (which I do in every free minute). These two things have combined to produce two novels that I am about to start marketing with a vengeance.
Oh, and I finally did get that Classics degree through Open University.
I’m married (to a gorgeous creature whom I love with all my heart despite the occasional resemblance to Attila the Hun when hungry or tired.) We have two dogs. Well… lurchers. Well… muppets. We live in the most idyllic, rural, and ever-so-slightly-inbred village where I raise catalogues and practice live chicken archery and weasel juggling.
Oh, and I have a thing about Moose, Otters and Walrus. Don’t ask me why.
SJA Turney books
- Marius' Mules
- Interregnum
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