Anton Van Iersel

"I enjoy living other people’s lives. That is why I write. My imagination is character-driven. This is a gamble. The plot puts people together that will inevitably decide for themselves where they’re going—regardless of the outline I start with. This mirrors my suspense when meeting someone for the first time, when I start thinking ahead in the story we might share together. If what happens proves very different from what I imagined, I like to pretend I know why."

Anton Van Iersel was born in Holland and grew up in the Caribbean, the US and England. English is his first language, and he is fluent in German. He has travelled widely on the European continent and in Africa. He is a translator, editor and copywriter and ran his own translation agency based in Munich for 27 years before devoting his time to creative writing. ‘No Noble Escape’ is his first novel, inspired by his own stays in a run-down Renaissance villa near a small village north of Rome.