Jonathan Calder was born in Perth, Scotland, and brought up in Stanley, a village on the River Tay. He started earning at twelve with a paper round, was a chain boy on the A9 while still at school, and left Dundee College of Technology in 1984 with a degree in civil engineering and a taste for going somewhere else.
Somewhere else turned out to be most of the world: forty years in oil and gas, from Scotland to New Zealand, the Gulf, Malaysia and the Philippines, site hut to Program Director. Around 2000, in Christchurch, he went to night classes in comedy writing and acting. The acting never took. The comedy, you'll have to judge for yourself.
He has been writing since the 1980s and now writes full time: memoir, fiction, a history of computing, a book about power, and the Calder Family Adventures for children, which began as bedtime stories that happened to be true. He finds books easier than project execution documents. If he gets a sentence wrong, nobody gets blown up.
He lives in the Philippines with his wife Chielo and their children, dictates every word by voice, and rides a Ducati, slowly. Jonathan Calder is a pen name. The man behind it is not hard to find, and he does not mind being found.
