Peter Carter : Children's: Oxford University Press

Peter Carter is of Anglo-Irish descent. His father served in the Royal Navy and three of his brothers served in the Armed forces in the Second World War. As a child he lived through the disruption created by the War as well as a period of ill-health.

After working in various outdoor occupations however, his health was restored and he went on to read English at Wadham College, Oxford.

After Oxford he became a teacher and taught in a number of schools in Birmingham. It was whilst he was teaching that he became interested in children's literature. Discovering that few children seemed to be interested in the traditional classics he decided to try writing children's novels himself.

Peter Carter regards himself as a 'realistic' writer in the mould of Robert Louis Stevenson. He admires the resilience, humour, and irony with which ordinary men and women face their daily lives.

He says his interests are those of any reasonably civilized person but his tastes are not exclusive. He enjoys Cole Porter as well as Mozart, Raymond Chandler as well as Flaubert, but the opening chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses represent an ideal of writing which, without too much hope, he aspires to.

Peter has travelled widely in Europe, Asia and North America, but now in a small village in the Cotswolds.