Peter's Blog

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Written by: Peter Crawley

Published: 26 February 2024

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Born in Chiswick, London, in 1956 Peter's formative years were spent on and around the North Downs of Surrey.

Although he studied physics and mathematics, he found his feet in social and political geography, and in the holidays laboured at a local pig farm.

Post school, he attended the Goethe Institut in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, South-West Germany, later working as a translator in Stuttgart. On returning to the UK, Peter made his home the Potter's Shop in Shere, writing novels, selling pots and sleeping in the office. He found employment as a barman, moss-gatherer, builder and roofer's mate, language and maths teacher, driver, guide and car cleaner, and generally turned his hand to whatever paid for food, a bath and a haircut.

In the Summer of the Queen's Jubilee, Peter quit cleaning cars and hitch-hiked to Cannes in the South of France, where he slept rough among the other itinerants living on the rocks of the Old Port and took day work painting and varnishing boats. However, fed up with nights interrupted by too many of the Cote d'Azur's less savoury characters, he signed up as a deckhand on a luxury yacht, cruised the Northern Mediterranean and, at the end of the season, crewed a 50 foot ketch to the West Indies.

Once repatriated to the UK, he bought a suit and worked as a salesman in showrooms in Surrey and London before starting his own business trading in second hand cars across the country and abroad. In 2011 he returned to writing.

Mazzeri, his first published novel, a story based on the experiences of his summers as a youth in Corsica, was published by Matador in 2013 and Boarding House Reach, set in Norfolk, the following year.

He has since published four more novels: Ontreto, set in Lipari near Sicily and the follow-up to Mazzeri; 

The Truth In Fiction, a collection of short stories; The Wind Between Two Worlds, set in contemporary London and  the prequel to Mazzeri; and more recently Constant Tides, the story of three generations of women in Messina, Sicily, a novel currently being translated for publication in Italy.

His latest novella What You Don't Know About Me was written in 28 days during the 2020 Covid-19 UK lockdowns.

Peter's interests include his family, listening to and recording people's stories, and his research for writing.