Ian Skewis was born in Scotland in 1970.
At the age of nine his schoolteacher stepped aside to allow him to teach his entire class about prehistory - as they both agreed that he knew more about these kinds of things than she did. Ian was also the first boy to join the exclusively female school choir too. He was very unconventional.
Whilst at secondary school he exhibited his own prints and poems up and down the country, wrote for a local free-paper and somewhere in between he managed to get some grades. In his final year he read what he describes as his ‘first really good book’, The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan, in 1989. Later that same year he began writing a novel of his own...
Ian went to art school in Aberdeen but got thrown out for being too bohemian and ended up at drama school instead, where he worked like a Trojan to make up for his earlier misdemeanours, emerging as a very professional actor and touring the world in various stage plays, including Like Thunder, in which he played the lead, and which won a Fringe First Award in 2001. He also appeared (briefly) in film and television.
However, increasingly disillusioned with the acting business, Ian ventured for the first time into the real world where he took on the roles of toilet cleaner, tarot card reader, perfumery salesman and mystery shopper before settling for Front Of House Manager for an event catering company. He later set up his own event planning company, Entitled Events.
Always writing throughout his life but never actually completing anything, he finally managed to finish writing a couple of short stories in 2013, The Circular Memory and Leviathan, followed the next year by a Doctor Who story, Borrowed Time, which was a Finalist in an international competition. In 2015 he wrote another short sci-fi story entitled Inkling, which has been published by The Speculative Bookshop in their debut anthology. In the biography for that publication he light-heartedly wrote, ‘Recently, he has actually managed to complete a few short stories, and Inkling is his first story to be published - who would have thought? Maybe, only maybe, he might get round to finishing what he started at the age of nineteen...’
And so here it is.
My debut novel, A Murder Of Crows, with your help to be published by Unbound Digital.
In development hell since 1989.
Please don’t ask for a sequel...oh, alright then...
