I am Philip Spires, born in June 1952 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in the north of England. I spent my first ten years in Sharlston, which was then a mining village, and the next eight in Crofton, a mile nearer Wakefield. I then went to London University, where I obtained a degree in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College and then a PGCE from King's. Then I spent two years as a VSO in Kenya, the experience which provided much of the material for Mission. During the next 16 years in London, when I worked in schools and colleges, I devoted much of my spare time to assisting my wife's work with a small charity concerned with development and human rights in what we used to call the Third World. In 1992 I completed a Master's Degree in Education and, at the end of the year, took a technical education post in Brunei and lived in South-East Asia until 1999. For the next three years I worked in Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. Since 2003, my wife and I have lived in Spain, where we have our own small tourism business. The space that this created allowed me to complete a PhD with the Open University in the contribution of education to personal and economic development in the Philippines and, after that, my first published novel, Mission.