An 80s childhood in rural Tasmania effectively forced me to develop an imaginary world to escape into or go insane. My parents got me into fantasy and science fiction early on – from Dad, The Lord of the Rings, from Mum, the books of John Wyndham – but it wasn’t until we moved to England that I really began to appreciate the sense of dark, creaking age which underpinned fantasy cycles like Mythago Wood and the Dark is Rising sequence and I starting getting into authors like James Herbert, HP Lovecraft, and Ramsey Campbell.