photo: Marion Macdonald

John Ward is the author of five published works. Four were published conventionally – The Secret of the Alchemist (2003), The Stone of Sorrow (2004) and City of Desolation (2005) by Studio 9 and The Comet’s Child (2009) by Strident.

This blog tells the story of the fifth, The McAvinchey Codex, which was typeset, printed, sewn, bound and published by the author, who is seen above in The Bookshop, Wigtown, where the book was first made available to the public in September 2017 at the Wigtown Book Festival, Scotland’s premier literary festival.

Before becoming a writer, John studied Philosophy and English at Edinburgh University, taught English at the Royal High School and a variety of subjects at Inverness College. He is married with four children and one grand-daughter and owns an unreasonable number of old bicycles, which he writes about, in a desultory fashion, on 40-635 . He has another blog on general topics, mostly philosophy, called Compleat Trowzer.