Gawain Barker

After a South Pacific childhood, Gawain Barker spent the next three decades cooking up a storm in a huge variety of restaurants, private homes, cooking shows, music festivals and resorts. From TV chefs like Rick Stein and Ainsley Harriott, through to techno ravers and bare-foot hippies, he's worked with the biggest cast of kitchen characters imaginable. The culinary autobiography – 200 Kitchens: Confessions of a Nomad Cook – tells this unique story.

Now retired from the kitchen and writing full-time, he has written a trilogy of crime thrillers, with a series to follow. Set in the tropics of Australia, this series takes the noir/private-eye template as a starting point to explore a wild and lawless era - Far North Queensland in the 1970s & 1980s.

Through decades of personal experience in the Far North, much research and many interviews with colourful local identities, he is recreating an untold time and place.

For more on the series - https://www.thecolourofshadows.com/