Richard Watt - biography
Richard was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, and has spent much of the intervening four decades moving away from it. He is now in British Columbia, Canada, reasoning that any further away, he would start coming back.
Aside from living in Essex as a child for a time - something over which he had no control, and which manifests itself these days in a vague interest in how West Ham are doing - Richard has lived in the following places: Edinburgh (where he gained a degree in Linguistics which has been put to almost no use at all); Inverness (including a spell living on Culloden Moor); Perth; Chorleywood; Tring (there really is a place called Tring, and it's not where they make bicycle bells); Watford; Edlesborough (all of the above being places in Britain), and now Prince George (which isn't).
Along the way, he has spent time persuading supermarket managers to stock books which mainly didn't sell; persuading cash & carry buyers to stock chocolate which mainly did sell (harder than it sounds, particularly for someone who is not one of life's natural salespeople); there has been a great deal of driving furiously up and down the motorways of Britain; not quite enough time doing the same on the autostrade of Italy; an awful lot of meetings, and a huge amount of fiddling about with computers, an activity which continues to this day.
Although he wanted to be a writer from an early age, life and its assorted diversions kept getting in the way. There was also the fact that his early poetry in particular was not terribly good. In 2006, after spending all his adult life up to that point in the arms of commerce, he took the first tentative steps towards achieving his dream. The Watt family sold up and headed for the other side of the world, partly with the hope that Richard would actually get some writing done. This succeeded to the degree that the most common thing people in town say to him on being introduced is "are you the guy from the paper?"
Readers of the Dear Friends letters will know that Richard has been married to Zoë since 1986. They have two boys and two cats.