‘LA PITTURA’ IS PUBLISHED ON 3RD SEPTEMBER 2026
I’m a Yorkshire based writer with a lifelong love of history and the arts. I grew up surrounded by the classics and trained in classical music, which gave me an early appreciation for the artists, writers and composers of the past. When I was eleven, a trip to Italy began a particular fascination with its art, architecture and culture that has stayed with me ever since.
Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy and George Orwell are among the writers who I keep coming back to, and have shaped the way I think about literature and storytelling. Those literary influences have followed me rather further into life than I might once have expected: my youngest son carries the names of all three as a tribute to some of the greatest to ever do it. The books I love most, however, tend to be those that explore what happens beneath the surface of a life. Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, with its secret existence hidden beneath an outwardly ordinary one, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with its exploration of what a terrible act does to the person who committed it, are particular favourites. I’m drawn to that same territory in my own writing: the distance between the person the world sees and the life taking place inside them, the consequences of our choices, and the complicated reasons people do things they themselves may not entirely understand.
It was exactly at this intersection between my past experiences and my favourite literary themes that I finally found La Pittura, my debut novel, having searched for many years for the inspiration. I had long felt frustrated at seeing how Artemisia Gentileschi can sometimes disappear behind the trial and the blood soaked Judith for which she is now so famous. It is a fictional story of murder and intrigue, of course, but also gives the master the credit she deserves for those things she achieved beyond the events for which she is best known, as it explores the truth of the fiercely competitive artistic world of seventeenth century Italy. A place where painters depended on patrons, reputations could be dangerously fragile, and beauty existed alongside considerable brutality, whilst through it all a woman was expected to juggle the daily pressures of money and family. At its heart La Pittura is about Artemisia herself: her ambition, her relationships, the compromises required to survive as a working artist, and a woman for whom painting becomes not simply what she does, but an inseparable part of who she is.
I live in Yorkshire with my wife, our two sons and our dog; and of course my other love, my extensive personal library!
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