Thomas Watson: I’ve always been a storyteller, and very early in my life found the written word to be my preferred method for telling tales. I grew up enjoying words for their own sake, with some of my earliest memories being of family members reading to me and teaching me to both read and write. Most of my childhood was spent in houses full of books, and reading inspired writing. The experience of reading stories, of having feelings and images conjured from my imagination merely by reading carefully arranged words, fascinated me. Somewhere, in a time lost to memory, reading inspired me to try writing my own stories – and that truly was a long time ago. Then as now, I wanted to see if my words could evoke emotions and images in the minds of other people. Have I succeeded in doing so? I have a certain amount of confidence in what I do but, really, success or failure in this regard is a call only readers can make.
