About

Matt Graydon has always written stories, first as a schoolboy, then as a journalist and PR and now, in the culmination of his life’s work, as a writer of striking historical fiction. He likes to explore offbeat perspectives, inspired by true stories, especially in his tales of life in wartime. In his recently published short story, Saigo No Tatakai, his account of a kamikaze attack on a British warship is seen through the eyes of both the pilot’s wife and a Royal Navy sailor who witnessed it up close.  Now, in his first novel, Leaving Fatherland, inspired by a true story, Graydon tells the tale of a liberal German who returns home from his life as a New York university student to fight for the Nazis.

Matt is half-Irish, grew up in a loving but strictly religious home and spent many months in hospital beds as a child. Now he enjoys spending his non-writing time standing in remote fields at night viewing and photographing stars and galaxies through his telescope, or attempting to keep his unruly Surrey garden in check. He lives in the one-pub village of South Nutfield with his wife and daughter, and sometimes son, who easily exceeded his father’s one year stay at university in the 1980s. Oh, and the family Cockapoo, Ozzy, a regular companion under the armchair, inherited from his grandpa, where he writes. Well-travelled, his passion for writing was ignited, at age 21, during a three-month, action-packed, hitch-hike across the USA, when his escapades made great material for an in-depth diary and, perhaps, one day, story.