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Quick Biography  I'm
a 34 year-old writer, journalist and Internet-type person, recently moved
from Dublin to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I grew up in England, raised by an
Irish mother and an English father, and have the gall to cheer for both
teams. My Dad had been a jazz musician, and together with my mother created
a home that was a little more relaxed than the others in my Home Counties
street. As an undergraduate at Cambridge I studied the unlikely subject known as Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic - essentially, history and languages of Britain and Ireland from 500-1000AD. I had no idea I'd end up writing a book about it. Ten years ago, after a year of working on company newspapers such as Thames Water News writing articles about sewage treatment works, I escaped to Dublin to do a Masters in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College. I was supposed to go back to England after that, but never really got round to it, and my professional life has been a mixture of journalism and high-technology work, including freelance journalism for The Irish Times, The Illustrated London News, and the acclaimed US online magazine, Salon. The day job is as a web developer with my own firm, Moore Consulting. From 1998-2000 I lived in Kansas and San Francisco, and returned to Dublin with a little bit of cash and a reluctance to get another job. Always keen on cycling, I finally had the opportunity to head off on a long bicycle tour. Yeah, but why? That might explain why I could travel from County Down to the Apennines by bike, following in the footsteps of a seventh-century saint, but it doesn't explain why I'd want to. A journey with a Dark Age Irish monk seemed a suitable antidote to all the newness of web work, especially as I was keen to get back to mainland Europe again after a long time away. It would also delay me trying to work out what I should do in a more long-term way. I've always been fascinated by the Irish 'peregrini' - the monks who set out across Europe from the late sixth century, and Columbanus' journey is the among the longest and most picturesque of the routes. Down the Loire, through Burgundy, into the Vosges, down the Rhine, across Switzerland, over the Alps, through Milan and finally to Bobbio in the Apennines. Driving would be too easy and too distanced from the landscapes I'd be travelling through. So a bike was to prove perfect - from Bangor to Bobbio. I did the trip in the summer and autumn of 2001, and completed the second draft of the book by the summer of 2002. Early in 2003 I found a publisher (Hodder Headline Ireland), and most of the year was spent on revisions and rewrites (fitted in between months spent in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and completing a second long bike journey - riding down the Mississippi). Now what are you doing? I'm getting settled in the US, doing some web and journalism work, and I've also finished the first draft of the second book, which recounts my 2000 mile bike ride from Fargo, North Dakota to New Orleans, following the Mississippi River. More information on the day-to-day stuff can be found on my blog, over at my main site, davidmoore.cc.
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ISBN: 0340832282 |
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