Hi, my name is Clifford Barker, I am a 47 year old mechanical design engineer. I was born in Sheffield, England, and am a father of three children, now all grown up. I already have one grandson who keeps me occupied. We have two dogs, two snakes and I like to ride my motorcycle a little too quickly. I also like to draw and have illustrated all the covers of the books I have written, now almost six of them.

Having worked all over the world, we have finally settled in Bryncethin, a sleepy rural village close to Bridgend in South Wales. I tried to write a book back in the 2000’s but that sort of petered out due to work commitments. I never considered writing as a career, but that is the dream at this point.

Since 2015 I have been writing a sci-fi series based around a human in the employ of a group of benevolent aliens who crashed to Earth millions of years ago. The idea was seeded by a dream / nightmare that kept recurring whilst I was trying to sleep. Each time the dream woke me up, but also the dream progressed further each of the four times I had it.

Eventually, it was my long suffering partner who suggested that maybe if I wrote the dream down, I might stop having it. This was a good idea, and I haven’t had the dream since, though the dream was a very bad place to begin a story, and so I had to begin again with the book Zero - Earth in its current form. I only just got around to using the details of the nightmare, at the very end of book 4 which I have fully written, but have yet to edit. I am hoping to release Zero - Into ashes sometime later in 2021, if I can finish my current project Ezra - The Moleculum.