Michael McGarrigle

I was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but I now live near the foot of a 1200m mountain in Hualien, which a small city on the Pacific coast of Taiwan. I have my own English school, wherein I devi...view moreI was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but I now live near the foot of a 1200m mountain in Hualien, which a small city on the Pacific coast of Taiwan. I have my own English school, wherein I devise new ways to teach English to Chinese-speaking children of 4-16 years old with varied degrees of success, amusement and pleasure. The humorous and heart-rending stories that have involved the students and the teacher who toil in this school could probably fill several weighty tomes. I love poetry, music, my family, writing and living in a place where I am misunderstood regularly, but where I am tolerated, where I am well fed and healthy and where opening my front gate reveals a spectacular view of the olive coloured sheer slopes of the tall mountain that I have already mentioned. I am grateful to this Earth’s inhabitants for giving me the sort of education that I could never have imagined to be possible in the callow days of my youth. I have experience in the teaching of English to Chinese-speaking children, television broadcasting, engineering, running a business, being a good and bad father and husband, finding and losing friends, being violently ill in strange places and being scared rigid by the earthquakes to which I will probably never become accustomed and which regularly shake the ground on which I now live. I have backpacked in six continents and has been violently and spectacularly ill in three of them. I have written three very different novels and one travel book. “The Benign Abductor of Souls” will be available from the middle of June 2015 and is the first of my works to be published, but definitely not the last. Quiet desperation is not my thing, so I live in hope and leaven my most impractical optimism with copious amounts of annoying pragmatism. I have purchased ten ISBN’s and abhor waste, so you can expect a regular output of work. I write about what I know, so the best way to get to know more about me, is to read my books or my blog.view less