The writing of short stories is one of the hardest literary arts going,but those who are committed to the genre are some of the finest writers there are – or have been – one only has to think of Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, and more recently Stephen King, to get the idea.

And Garry Kilworth of course, whose collection, In the Country of Tattooed Men – which was re-published a couple of years ago – is an exceptional, beautiful, dark, frightening, very real, and in places very funny, collection indeed.

Garry Kilworth was born in York in 1941. His father was in the RAF, and the whole family travelled widely throughout the 1950s, with Aden (now Yemen) Garry’s favourite place, which is odd (but Garry Kilworth is a bit odd) because for many in the RAF and the British Army (and I knew one or two) Aden seems to have been their least favourite posting, with Cyprus top of the list, and something of a reward for enduring Aden.

Like most writers before him schoolboy Garry spent most of his time reading the adventure stories of Rudyard Kipling (as did Charles Whiting his fellow Yorkshireman), and Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, with the latter essential reading for any writer at any age, anywhere.
She is the master of the light comic touch. And although Kilworth’s stuff is dark it is nonetheless full of humour.

By the time Kilworth was 15 he’d been to twenty-two different schools, and was about to make it twenty-three when he decided to join the RAF as a boy entrant. He spent what sounds like seventeen very happy years in the service.

I guess what the RAF gave him was time to write (Alan Sillitoe used his time in the RAF to hone his writing skills too). After the RAF he spent eight years with Cable & Wireless – Bernard Shaw did the same with the Edison Telephone Company before getting his first play produced.

Kilworth’s writing breakthrough came when his short story “Let’s Go To Golgotha” which won a prestigious Sunday Times competition. He has won many awards and prizes since then.

1976 saw the publication, by Faber & Faber, of his first novel, In Solitary. Since then he’s written over seventy novels, and hundreds of short stories.

Thinking he’d neglected his education Kilworth, in middle-age, obtained an honours degree in English from London University, and assures us that if writing was outlawed tomorrow he’d become a criminal. We have to be thankful for that.

Garry Kilworth, as Garry Douglas Kilworth, also writes historical novels which includes the Fancy Jack Crossman series of Crimean War adventures, which are a superb and breathless read. With the latest Crossman novels, our eponymous hero has left the Crimea to fight in India, and then New Zealand.

Currently Garry is writing a series of adventure novels set during the Zulu Wars of the 1870s.

Garry is also a lovely man – met him at the Stratford International Festival of Literature last year – and a damned good writer.