Ian Dowding

Hello – this is just a bit about me as an author. I started my working life in the restaurant trade as a chef and for a time owned and ran my own restaurant. I have always written stuff and at one time wrote a regular column for a catering trade magazine called appropriately ‘The Restaurant Business’. I always had a desire to write a novel but first brought out a cookery book called ‘Fish Bananas’, which is a collection of recipes from my cooking career.

The first novel I published was called ‘Fish Farce’ (I know, I have a thing about fish!). It is the story of a young man in a search for his biological father. With its title and my background one would imagine it was going to be about cooking. It isn’t. There’s a bit of food and cooking, but also adventure, mystery, some rogues, a few heroes, a bit of sex, pyromania, art, Elvis and romance – a bit like life really.

My next novel is about the smuggling that went on along the south coast of England in the 18th Century. It came about because I once worked in the village of Jevington in Sussex not two miles from the sea where a lot of smuggling had once taken place so I knew the history, the stories and the location, but because history rarely records details I made most of it up.

By a process of sheer serendipity I seem to be remembered as the creator of something called Banoffi Pie and only recently found out I am a nephew of the train robber Ronnie Biggs. Luckily I don’t believe I have ever stolen anything in my life and now live quietly in Sussex with my wife. I have two grown up children and four grandchildren.