Profile:

About This Author

Mike Richards was born in 1936 in an industrial town in North West England. He won a scholarship to the Birkenhead Institute and had a thorough academic education. He joined SHELL Research and attended Technical College part time - finishing after 5 years with an external degree from Imperial College , London in Physical Chemistry. He did National Service as a Staff Officer at HQ Bomber Command, Nuclear Weapons Division, and returned to SHELL as group leader of the Jet Fuel development team, and later as Marketing Executive in the International Marketing Department on the South Bank, London. Having a wanderlust, he quit and joined ENJAY Chemicals, a subsidiary of EXXON, New York and worked in New York, Washington DC and San Antonio, Texas as a sales service engineer. He returned to Europe in 1966, and lived in the Pyrenees and wrote a novel Rebel, Rebel, Rebel which did not sell - but on his return to the |UK he wrote 2 scripts for GRANADA TVs Coronation Street. (the novel eventually became a 3 Act play THE ALL NIGHT PARTY) Unable to make a living as a writer he returned to the international oil industry and for the next 40 years worked in Iran, Venezuela, Norway, Egypt, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and China - and finished by working as a consultant in Saudi Arabia. It was during his time in Saudi Arabia, without his young family, that he returned to writing and had his book THE GULF published by You Write On. One of his plays EXPATRIA also had a reading at The Soho Theatre in London. He is now retired, and lives with his family in New South Wales, Australia. He is working on a sequel GULF 2 "The Beginning of Sorrows"