David Field

I am a professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. I am an astronomer and physicist, teaching students and doing research, using the great telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. My wife is a doctor. We have two daughters, the younger at high school, the elder presently studying in China, as part of her university course in Chinese. We have a busy life, with both my wife and I hard at work or travelling abroad. I am away at scientific meetings, mostly in Europe, between once and twice a month.

We have lived in various countries, England, Germany, France, China and Denmark and have many ties and good friends throughout Europe and in the USA. After my PhD in Cambridge, I moved to Gottingen, then to Bristol, with brief interludes in Paris and Nanjing, and we are now settled in Aarhus.

I have been writing all my life but, until 1992, I had only written scientific articles. I started to write short stories on the metro (the subway) in Paris, to relieve the boredom of a slow train journey to the Paris Observatory each morning, recording on scraps of paper the tales that I was telling my children at the time. One of these stories grew and grew into a book, Friends and Enemies, which I hope that you may find pleasure in reading!