Mat Larkin wrote his first short story when he was eight. It was awful.
He wrote another story, and it was appalling. His next three stories were very poor indeed. At least one of them had Doctor Who in it.
When his sixth story was merely mediocre, he started to get the feeling he might be on to something.
Nearly twenty years later, having written a few really quite nice stories, he began writing a novel. Five years after that, in April 2005, he quit his job in order to finish it, on the basis that he didn’t actually have another twenty years to spend mucking about.
The novel, called The Last Monk, was described as a ‘brilliant, extremely funny, well-plotted, clever, pacy and, I dare say it, commercial novel’ by a major fiction publisher in the UK who furnished the book with an outstanding back-cover review in lieu of actually publishing it.
Since then Mat has surprised himself by becoming, in ascending order of surprise: a regularly published freelance journalist, a poker tournament director and four centimetres taller than he had thought.
Mat Larkin lives in Melbourne, Australia and is tall but not unreasonably so.
For all enquiries, you can email mat at matlarkin.com.
