Alex Murray

ABOUT ME

Being an architect is a full time job, so when I retired a few years ago, suddenly free of clients chipping my fees and recalcitrant contractors, I was freed to pursue the other activities that have always had a pull on me. The first was writing while another was art. The two came together one evening when I was confronted by a paricularly revolting excrescence which spurred me to try to understand what its creator – artist isn't the right word here – was trying to communicate and then, when encounters like this were becoming a pattern, realising that this was an ideal subject for a comic novel. The writing of which helped straighten out my own understanding of art and how it works.

And me? Not much, it's what a man does that is more important. Born in Malta in 1950, emigrated to South Africa when I was seven, grew up in Durban where I began my studies in architecture at the University of Natal, came to London to complete them at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, got married, helped raise the family in Chiswick, London, and continued practising my profession principally in London but with short interludes in Teheran, Durban, Berlin and Luxembourg. And well as having had the privilege of designing some nice buildings on the way. I am now divorced but remain in convivial contact with the Ex and have two wonderful grown up children in London.

A few years ago I moved to Aldbourne, Wiltshire, a delightful village set in the North Wessex Downs where the world keeps reassuringly still. And a locality that provides easy access to family, friends and my former haunts in London. Perhaps a novel about that city might be next. Interests? Other than writing, architecture and art, are sketching, chess, writing the occasional poem and article, walking and playing appalling tennis.