Michael DeLarrabeiti

Michael DeLarrabeiti was brought up in Battersea, one of five children, and educated at Clapham Central Secondary School.

After leaving school at sixteen, he worked at many things, but mainly on camera in documentary films and as a travel guid in France and Morocco. In 1959 he fell in with a group of Provencal shpherds and went with them on the transhumance, herding three thousand sheep from their winter pasture to summer pasture in the French Alps. He then taught English in Casablanca, and in 1961 was the photographer on Oxford University's Marco Polo expedition, travelling four months overland on a motorcycle to Afghanistan and India. He later read French and English at Trinity College Dublin, won a scholarship to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and began a DPhil at Oxford which he later abandoned to take up full-time writing.

His published works include The Redwater Raid, A Rose beyond the Thames, The Bunce, Igamor, The Provencal Tales, The Hollywood Takes and The Journal of a sad Hermaphrodite.