Mark Antony Cotterill

About the Author

From a young age, I have been captivated by the art of storytelling, completely addicted to Sci-Fi and Fantasy. I grew up all over the UK, moving frequently because of my father's work, and as you can imagine I developed a vivid imagination, my days filled with new places and new experiences. Although I struggled with dyslexia and initially gave up on reading, I absorbed countless stories in other ways - through audiobooks, films, and the tales people told around me.

My journey into writing began, unglamorously, after college: contracts, procedures, business letters and work papers. But in 2021, on a flight from South Africa to Tanzania, I wrote a short story called "The Dream" and nervously shared it with family and friends. Their encouragement changed everything.

In November 2023, sitting on the shore of Lake Victoria as warm rain moved across the water, I opened my iPad and began what became my debut novel, "A Band of Unlikely Warriors: Legends Awakened" - a 170,000-word epic fantasy, published a year later, and the opening of a much larger saga inspired by the world-building of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. The second book in the series is underway.

Alongside the fiction, I discovered a quieter pleasure: making books people put their hands on. My large-print word search collections - "Total Recall" and "Golden Years Nostalgia" - grew from watching how much joy a simple puzzle brings, especially to older solvers revisiting the music, television and memories of their younger years. Easy on the eyes, generous with nostalgia.

Then life added a new kind of story. As a father teaching my own three-year-old about Allah and the Arabic language, I went looking for activity books that were beautiful, accurate and genuinely fun - and couldn't find quite what I wanted. So I made them. The "Learn & Colour" series was born at my kitchen table: books where children colour real Arabic calligraphy, trace actual letters, and learn about their faith one page at a time. Every page is tested by the toughest critic I know - a three-year-old with a green pencil.

So that is my shelf: puzzles for grandparents, learning books for little hands, and an epic saga for everyone in between. Whether I'm building fantasy worlds or helping a small hand write Alif for the first time, it comes from the same place: a lifelong love of stories and the belief that they belong to everyone - including those of us who found reading hard.

Thank you for being here. There is much more to come.