Jon Voelkel

Jon Voelkel grew up in Peru, Costa Rica and Colombia. He was not a natural-born adventurer and found life in the jungle difficult, to say the least. Having survived monkey stew, an attack by giant rats, and a plane crash in the middle of the rainforest, he escaped to college in Minneapolis and went on to business school in Barcelona. After working in advertising agencies in Spain, Holland and England, he started his own agency in London with four other partners - one of whom would be his future wife. In 2001, the London Financial Times named him one of the top fifty creative minds in Britain. While Jon was battling the daily perils of the jungle, Pamela Craik Voelkel was writing stories and dreaming of adventure in a sedate seaside town in the north of England where nothing ever happened. After graduating from Leeds University in English Language and Literature, she fled to London to take any job with writer in the title. After stints reviewing books, writing catalogs and penning speech bubbles for photo-romances, she become an advertising copywriter. As Creative Director of Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel, she helped the agency win literally hundreds of creative awards. In 2001, the Voelkels moved to rural Vermont and began work on 'Middleworld', the first book they have written together. In an interesting male/female collaboration, Jon plots out the action (much of it based on his own childhood memories and the bedtime stories he tells their three children), then Pamela fleshes out the characters and decides how they feel about things.