Stephen Salam

For almost 40 years I have been a Producer and Director of content in broadcast TV, advertising and corporate films. In my spare time I like to travel, play the piano (badly), go to gigs and ride a bike.

I was born in North Shields, in the North East of England, in 1961. My father Junos worked as a plater in the shipyards on the River Tyne and my mother Rita worked in various factories and shops. I was brought up in a council house with my two younger brothers Christopher and David, and I was educated at the local comprehensive school. After my A levels, I entered Durham University, where I read physics and grew to appreciate the way great scientists such as Einstein and Dirac could describe the Universe by harnessing the power of their imaginations.

After graduating, I was offered a trainee position in a film production company in Newcastle, where I learned to load movie cameras, edit pictures and eventually to be a director. After winning my first Royal Television Society award in 1990 for a documentary about Rugby School, I decided to set up my own production company. Since then I have been lucky enough to make films all over the world, and have worked with a variety of odd, interesting and very talented characters along the way. I am still a hands on film maker, and my passion lies in the structuring of content to deliver an engaging narrative.

At school my study of literature was fairly limited for reasons that were unfathomable at the time, and so it never occurred to me that I might eventually become a writer. While at university I made a conscious decision to engage with literature and started reading the works of authors including J.R.R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, Emile Zola, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Hardy, Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock and Ernest Hemingway to name just a few.

Eventually, after many years of thinking about it and collating ideas for the Legends of the Astraxi, I came to the conclusion that I should write my own books to describe fantastic worlds or alternative universes, where anything is possible and the only limit is my imagination and that of the reader.