Brian Pendreigh

I was always a big film fan from early childhood. I ran the film club at school and when I became a journalist on The Scotsman I developed a specialism in film, going to the Oscars and to the Cannes Film Festival. I went freelance in 1997 and wrote regularly for many publications, including the Sunday Times, the Guardian, where I had a regular features slot for several years, and the excellent Hotdog magazine, which styled me as associate editor. I also wrote a number of film books, including one on Ewan McGregor, which was translated into Japanese. More recently I was editor of The Times on Cinema. My novel The Man in the Seventh Row was first published in 2011 when all the talk was about the printed book being dead and the future being ebooks. One of the arguments was that going with a start-up ebook publisher would ensure that the book would always be available, whereas most traditional books go out of print after a few years. Ironically the original publisher folded a few years ago and The Man in the Seventh Row became unavailable, while you could pick up all the other books fairly readily on eBay or from second-hand shops. Rights reverted to me, so I am publishing it now through Kindle, both as a stand-alone novel and in a separate volume with three short stories that serve as companion pieces.