Gavin Smithers

I graduated from Oxford University in English in 1982.

After a first career in banking, I owned and ran a business and worked as a business consultant.

I had always done some private teaching. When I moved to the Cotswolds in 2009 this started to take up more of my time.

Out of that teaching experience came an opportunity to share with a wider audience what had helped and stimulated my students. The first of my "Gavin's Guides" was on Emily Dickinson. While I was writing the second, on the First World War poet, Edward Thomas, I found what I am convinced is an important secret code he left for his readers to find, in a series of poems he wrote in 1915.

I haven't found secret codes in the poetry of Andrew Marvell, or in Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" and Dickens' "Great Expectations"! But what I am doing in my guides is trying to offer something rather different from the more traditional ones- I devote more attention to the writer's methods and techniques, because I believe that understanding this will lead us straight to the true meaning of the text and to their message.

When I'm not writing, or teaching for the 11 plus, GCSE or A-level, I play tennis and play the piano, and follow the fortunes of Arsenal FC.