Andy Shaw
Andy Shaw was born in Wolverhampton, England, in 1954. His schooling was unconventional due to a middle class mother with wandering-gypsy tendencies, and a father who liked trying different things. Expelled from his first (English) boarding school, he then survived his second (Irish) boarding school before attending a Secondary Modern (enlightened) school in Cornwall and finally running away to sea from the Scottish High (Grammar) school in Argyll, with one "O" level certificate: English Composition. He was just sixteen.
After several jobs without pay, in various rust-buckets and downright dangerous vessels, he managed to get into a proper merchant naval company and served half of a four-year navigating apprenticeship. By his 17th year he had completed three circumnavigations, and now finding the excitement diminished, opted to join the deep sea fishing industry. He sailed out of the port of Hull in Yorkshire, in March 1972, to celebrate his eighteenth birthday by being violently seasick in the Denmark Strait.
Three years and one Cod War later he fell in love and began to sail in smaller ships closer to home. Eventually he came ashore, worked in many manual jobs, lost his self-esteem and the love of his life, and in desperation decided to join the army to "sort himself out".
Instead he found the Royal Marines and in 1976 he began a 20 year career that took him to war six times, saw him married with two daughters and then, through suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the loss of the second love of his life, which included his entire family. In 1996 he left England for good and went back to sea in a small wooden boat to find himself once more.
His real life-long writing ambitions were finally realised when he stopped wandering the North Atlantic, with his new wife Cheralie and their Cairn terrier Rosie, and began writing his first novel, "The Man in the Mist", in Portugal. It became a vital part of his recovery, which took 30 years to achieve.
Eventually he arrived in Ibiza and in 2000 Tom was born. In 2009, after eighteen years aboard "My Fair Lady", he came ashore and finally drew a line under the PTSD experience. He now lives in a small Spanish village and when he isn't writing he helps others with similar problems to rebuild their lives, through a programme called "The Mountain Way", which he runs in the Pyrenees in Southern France.
Andy's next book is called "Tranquillo darling" and is about his life on the wooden ketch "My Fair Lady". It will be published on Kindle Direct Publishing as soon as he finds the time to upload it.
