WHO AM I?

I could be your editor.

With over twenty years’ experience freelancing for such publishers as HarperCollins, Piatkus, Virgin, and Little, Brown, my focus is on proofing and copy editing texts from every genre of fiction and non-fiction. While I specialise in action, crime and mystery, I have also worked on everything from horror to historical thrillers, romantic comedies to erotica, film guides to travellers’ handbooks, not to mention the biographies of such diverse characters as Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, Anthony Hopkins and Princess Diana.

A gamekeeper turned poacher, I am also a published author. In 2013 Mills & Boon commissioned from me How to Write Erotica: A Guide (look in the Kindle Store for its spicy pink and black cover). One breathless reviewer acclaimed it as “Very informative…” I thank them.

Equally at home with both UK and US English, I also possess a very useful BA (Honours) degree in Modern Languages (French and German) from St John’s College, Oxford.

For three years I was on the editorial team of Proscenium Theatre Publications Ltd, writing and editing a wide range of articles for theatre programmes throughout the UK before becoming editor of Bath & West Life, a full-colour glossy lifestyle magazine for the southwest of England. I also worked for nearly twenty years as a puzzles sub-editor at the Press Association, writing, proofing and formatting every kind of puzzle for a wide range of national and international newspapers and magazines, both in print and online.

As a general knowledge quiz fan, I have appeared on, amongst others, BBC2’s Only Connect, and BBC1’s Mastermind several times, once as a semi-finalist. My specialist subjects focused on some of my favourite authors, vis, the stage plays of Tom Stoppard, the television plays of Alan Bennett, and the Unreliable Memoirs series of autobiographies by Clive James. But my main claim to fame is that in the long hot summer of 1976 I danced a duet on the stage of the Oxford Playhouse with Rowan Atkinson.

I live in the southwest of England with my wife Katherine and an old shouty cat called Colin. We like to holiday around the Mediterranean. Here I am, for instance, at Sirmione on Lake Garda, Italy a few years ago, when suede shoes were in.

Robin Seavill - Editor