Tim Wynne-Jones

As a child

I was born in Bromborough, Cheshire. I only lived there until I was three months short of four-years-old. I ran away from home with a tea cosy on my head and ended up in Northern British Columbia, right up there near the Alaska panhandle. Okay, both those things are true but there must have been some other steps between them. I lived there until I was seven and it was a great adventure. Then we moved to Vancouver and life got to be pretty ordinary.

As an adult

I studied Architecture, first of all, and got through three years of that before they kicked me out. I think they were afraid that if I were to design buildings people would die. Architecture was all I’d wanted to do since I was eleven, but I wasn’t cut out for it. So, my dreams shattered, I left school and joined a rock band. Boogie Dick. I was the lead singer. I wore robes and painted my face paisley and played an electric baseball bat and burned things on stage. Eventually, I decided maybe I ought to go back to school. I studied visual art and got a degree. But I still played in rock bands, except this time they were sane. I eventually got an MFA in visual art, which is when I wrote my first novel. I guess I was just tired of art…writing was like a holiday. The first novel took five weeks to write, which is fast, but then I guess I’d been building up to it for a long time.

As an author

I work in my loft at the top of my house in the country. I like to write early in the morning when my head works. As the day goes on I get dumber, so I usually stop writing in the mid afternoon. Which is when I do all those chores a person has to do like shopping and paying bills and stuff – stuff you don’t really need an imagination for.

Things you didn't know about Tim Wynne-Jones

1. I love to cook. Well, actually I like cutting things up: vegetables and things. It’s a great way to end a busy day sitting in front of a computer making things up. Vegetables are very real.
2. I once caught a seagull when I was fishing. At least I think I did. It might have been someone else and I just decided to remember that I did it. Anyway, one of us – me or the other guy – was casting off a dock and the seagull swooped down and grabbed the bait…and the hook. It’s very hard to land a bird…
3. When I was three I ran away from home with a tea cosy on my head.
4. Not long after that, in northern B.C., I went hunting with the Kitimaat Indians. This really did happen. We moved from Cheshire to the northwest coast of Canada and Dad often hunted with the Indians and I got to go along. There’s a picture of me somewhere playing soldiers with shotgun shells.
5. I’m red-green colour blind. Which was really a problem when I did my Masters degree in visual arts and had to teach colour theory. I seldom really mix up pure red and green but I often mix up turquoise and purple.
6. I like to do crosswords puzzles but even better, I like to make up crossword puzzles. It’s a lot harder. You can almost hear your brain working. It’s comforting to know it does.
7. Apart from cooking, I love eating. Especially food.
8. I’m a big fan of NFL football. I know, I know – it’s not really football. And I really like the real game of football too (I’m a Liverpool fan). But I love NFL football. Especially the New England Patriots.
9. I was lucky enough to do a reading with J.J. Rowling. Ken Oppel and I were her warm-up act when she read at the Sky Dome in Toronto. It’s the biggest reading ever – check out The Guinness Book of Records. Twenty-thousand plus!
10. I have a cabin in northern Ontario that you can’t reach by road. You have to fly in. In a plane, I mean. Or you can take a special train that will drop you off wherever you ask them to.