David was born in Lincoln and mainly schooled in the Isle of Ely, also studying in the Fens and the Black Forest. He has lived in the USA, Caribbean and South America as well as the UK. Currently based in the Midlands, he travels as a consultant to insurance markets around the world. Researching and producing for publication reports on these – usually the length of novels – may have instilled more discipline in David’s creative writing. In 2021 his first fiction Seventeen came out, an adventure fantasy story aimed at and beyond young adults.
From Seventeen’s mainly masculine world of Pirates, Knights, Army and Westerners, the contemporary novel Them Roper Girls returned in 2022 to our own. With humour and compassion it traces in their own voices the lives of four sisters over more than sixty years from their troubled 1950s childhood. A husband of a Roper sister takes centre stage in Them Feltwell Boys (2023). With the same gritty realism and sometimes dark humour found in its predecessor, this follows Ray Roden’s crude attempts at teenage love in counterpoint to his cynical womanising as an adult.
David’s 2025 novel The Tuesday-Thursday Tontine: Last Man Standing is set in the period from 2017 to 2025, encompassing that of the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores relationships of baby boomers with each other, their previous and subsequent generations, and what it takes to be a man in the modern world.
Also active in non-fiction, David has published to date two volumes of When Life Gives You Strawberries – Memories of a Fenland Boy. If the 2024 Sunny Side of the House narrative of a 1960s East Anglian boyhood sometimes reads like fiction, the detailed evocation of characters and events, by turns humorous and traumatic, anchors it in remembered facts. The author does not soft-pedal the dysfunction at the core of a wide, supportive family in which the boy faces adult challenges, including jarring discoveries about his parents’ separate and shared history. In 2026 Wendy takes up the story from 1978, with the author engaged in his first professional job after university and an eventful courtship.
For more biographical detail see this website’s Dave Daze feature, with new entries each day – over 2,200 to the end of 2027 – of bite-size (55-word maximum) extracts from contemporary diaries and other writings on the same date over more than 55 years.
David can also be found on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
