Ray Stuart

Born in London and raised in Hertfordshire and Suffolk, Ray was drifting through high school until he discovered punk rock. From then on, he spent his time nurturing a singular lack of musical ability, until realising too late that exam success might have been a better option. Despite his abysmal school results, he went on to forge a career as a nurse, such was the desperation of the NHS in the early 80s.

In 2016 he and his wife Alison decided to leave the rat race, so they sold their home and spent the year living in a motorhome. Life on the road re-ignited a desire to write that had never been entirely extinguished despite the best efforts of his teachers.

His previous writing experience includes company annual reports, a punk rock fanzine and forging notes from his mother to excuse him from PE. In 2018 he published his first book, Downwardly Mobile spending the best part of 2016 working at festivals and discovering the UK from the vantage point of their motorhome called Mavis.

After moving to the Isle of Mull and living in their motorhome Ray published the next instalment of his Still Following Rainbows. It documents the highs and lows of adjusting to life and work on a Scottish island, with snippets of history, vivid descriptions of the landscape and plenty of humour.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, as if things bad enough, Ray decided to raid his scrap book for unpublished articles, short stories and pieces cut from his other books and released Even Unicorns Die - a collection of short stories, articles and assorted nonsense, as an economy-priced diversion for everyone stuck at home.

These days Ray is officially a hypocrite. He works for someone with an unhealthy portion of the alphabet after his name, is a vegetarian who likes smoked salmon and hasn't read nearly as much radical literature as he'd like you to think he has. He occasionally DJs, owns an eclectic assortment of music and enjoys disc golf, writing and plotting to overthrow the government.