From an early age, Percy Stewart was always a writer. In 1975, unconventional essays on Shakespeare, Lawrence and Eleanor Rigby won him a scholarship to Cambridge, but academic life was not his natural environment.

'From childhood I was fascinated by the wildlife around the fields where we lived, something as everyday as a pheasant or a butterfly. The only reason I eventually agreed to go to university was that I thought it might allow me to become a wildlife photographer and writer, but things don't always go the way we have planned.'

'Had I understood the strengths and weaknesses of my own work at the age of eighteen, I would never have given in to pressure from teachers to give them their moment of glory when one boy in the year gets to a top university. When a pupil has such strong, lasting interests as I had done from five to eighteen, they should be encouraged and not pressured to do something for which they are completely unsuited.

'Using and developing our natural strengths is the very basis of a healthy human community. We certainly should not squash genuine creative energy and dedication, just to fit institutionalised ideas about safe career-structures. Instead, seeing the mess we are currently making of our world, and all of the young people who are crumbling under artificial, unnecessary pressures, we ought to be questioning the validity of those institutions.

'Finally, after all these years, studying literature in my teens and reading Anthropology at Cambridge is proving to be a very useful. I had never thought of myself as a novelist, but it now feels as natural as riding a bicycle..so perhaps those teachers were right, in a circuitous kind of way.'

'Curiously, the only one of them who saw my natural direction was our games teacher. I was hopeless at rugby, but he was clearly a very wise man who loved the wild orchids in the countryside near his house.

Some supernatural or serendipitous events recounted in the trilogy are exactly as Percy Stewart remembers them, while others are a synthesis or an invention.

'Somewhere the games teacher's ghost must be chuckling at the prescience of his kind words in 1973. His own surname was the French for a childhood-favourite bird which I found the very first day back on familiar French ground, over half a century later, and his first name is in the English name of the place.

'Completing the circle which I only saw a few minutes ago, I remembered that the English name for the bird is the fictitious name for J.M.W. Turner, as played by Timothy Spall in a wonderful film which I had mentioned in the novel long before I found the bird in France.

'How could my games-teacher's name possibly be linked to Timothy Spall's character by way of one of my favourite childhood birds...the one which I endlessly tried to paint, and the principle reason why I didn't become an artist like my father? Conan-Doyle could have had fun with that one, knowing that it is absolutely true.'

'I do love simple, dry facts, as opposed to convoluted psychological explanations for why people do what they do, why we seem to make some very strange choices. The problem for most of us is that from childhood our brains are so cluttered with millions of proxy-memories, from television, the internet, computer-games and even from books, that we forget that somewhere buried under a huge, sprawling pile is a real memory of exactly what did happen.'

'The 'purpose' of all these connections will become clear in Feeding the Vultures. As far as it goes, it is absolutely true.

'My scientific education taught me to be sceptical of the apparently-inexplicable, such as premonitions, and in almost every case I can find some kind of connection with forgotten memories which are prodding me, asking to be brought to the surface, often surfacing in dreams which may pass through my half-consciousness so that once in a while I appear to see something moments before it happens.

'But sometimes I do wonder. In these books I leave it up to the reader to decide, because even for my own limited experience, I have no clear answers.'