You didn't actually click on that link, did you? Jeez. Alright then, for what it's worth this is me:
I'm a Mancunian by birth, a Tasmanian by childhood, and an adopted Brummie by, er, adulthood, such as it is. My parents were Ten Pound Poms - that is, they moved to Australia on the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme when I was nary but a toddler - and before we all moved back to the UK again in the 80's we all got made Aussies, so I've got dual citizenship. I probably still do, unless the rules have changed. To compound the confusion, my daughters were born out there, but raised here. All this goes to explain simply that I've bounced back and forth between England and Australia and that I seem to have stopped for a while. Personality-wise it also explains why I tend to be loud and bolshy and then immediately apologetic about it afterwards.
It may also help to explain what I write. I like the marginal places between one thing and another; the grey areas; the edgelands. This leads to a fascination with genre writing which doesn't sit in easily marketable genres - slipstream, I suppose it's called. As someone aspiring to be a professional and commercially viable writer, I recognise that this is Not A Helpful Thing.
However, this is a thing about which I do not care. Certain tropes in 'genre' writing bore the arse off me, and it's probably down to what I consumed as a teenager.
I'd like to say I read lots of cool and edgy stuff when I was a teenager, but I didn't, and anybody who says they did is probably lying. Here's what I packed when we moved from the rural idyll and cultural sink-hole of Sheffield, Tasmania to the howling wasteland of the Cumbrian borders as a 16-year old: Tolkien, Julian May, Douglas Adams, Stephen Donaldson, Wyndham, Clarke, King, Asimov, Herbert (Frank) and probably other things I've forgotten, but you get the gist. I watched Battlestar Galactica (the real one, folks, not that pseudo-political-religious-allegorical navel-gazing remake), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (the remake, folks, with Erin Gray as Wilma Deering, be still my turbulent adolescent loins), Knight Rider - indeed, anything out of the Glen A Larson stable. Look, this was Tasmania in the 70's, okay? Moving to England and into my 20's introduced me to Clive Barker, Poppy Z, Anne Rice, Robert Holdstock, Christopher Fowler, Simon Maginn, and Herbert (James) - all in all a bit weirder, a bit darker, but nothing massively Out There; basically when my housemates were getting stoned and freaking themselves out with Hunter S Thompson I was still writing role-playing adventures.
I am, in other words, not your compass for the hinterlands of speculative fiction.
What I like is story.
(this is unfinished, but Detectorists is on the telly, which should explain everything)