Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (59 page)

M
ARK
H
ODDER
was born in Southampton, England, but lived for many years in London. He is an ex-commercial copywriter, BBC web producer, journalist, and editor. After too many years running the rat race, he threw in the towel and moved to Valencia in Spain, seeking quality of life rather than quantity of income. After a few months teaching English as a foreign language, he wrote his first novel,
The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
, which won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2010. After that, there was no looking back, and Mark now works as a full-time novelist, thus fulfilling his wildest dreams, which he started having around the age of eleven after reading Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, P. G. Wodehouse, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In addition to speculative and detective fiction, he is interested in Buddhism, transcendentalism, all the ITC TV programmes of the 60s and 70s, and techie-gadgety things.