Derek Handley

Derek Handley was born in October, 1973, in Ireland. He grew up in a town in west County Dublin, and despite focusing on science in school and university, was always filling notebooks with short stories and ideas for stories. It wasn't until he started traveling that he started to consider sharing them.

In 1994, Derek moved to Wroclaw, Poland, to study Geology for a year. He fell in love, and stayed for eleven years. He also discovered that he wanted to be an ESL teacher and a writer, not a scientist.

In 1998, he was badly injured and as a result, uses a wheelchair. He has not let this stop him: if anything, he has traveled more since the injury. He lived in Austin for a short while, then moved back to Europe to live in Essen and then Dusseldorf. After two years in San Francisco, and then a year traveling as much as possible, he returned to Dusseldorf to stay. Along the way, he learned several languages, and aims to speak ten languages by his 50th birthday.

Derek's first writing job was creating backstory for a Polish MMORPG. He moved from there to blogging and interview writing, and including a briefly popular blog about life as a wheelchair user for the Today blogging site. For a few years, he has been contributing to language textbooks.

"Cover Stories" includes his first printed fiction. He is currently working on another anthology.