John was born and raised in Leicester. There, he was fortunate enough to receive a very good education at the highly respected Gateway Grammar School, for which he has ever been grateful.
It was in Leicester that he met and married his lovely Anne. Over the years they moved steadily south with John’s work and eventually finished up in East Grinstead. John spent twenty-five years working in Corporate Finance, mostly up in ‘The City’, and then, after he retired, several years as a financial advisor at a local social housing association.
John has two sons and two grandsons. He is a volunteer at The Macmillan Cancer Support Centre at East Surrey Hospital, where he supports and counsels cancer patients and their families.
It was only about four years ago that John started writing seriously. He is self-taught and still very much learning the trade. He likes to write short stories ranging from 500 or so words (flash fiction) up to about four thousand words. He’ll try any genre, but nothing too literary (“boring!”). He enjoys the discipline this type of writing requires – having to reduce everything to its essence and using words only if they add to the story.
‘Captivating Conversations’ is an anthology of twenty of his stories, of which so far seventeen have been successful in various international writing competitions (see ‘Awards’). He hopes people will enjoy reading them as much as he’s enjoyed writing them. The stories are meant to be fun and to make people smile. They are all very different from each other but there is a theme running through them – they take the form of conversations between two or more people. John doesn’t have much input to those conversations; the voices in his head do all the work and he just writes down what they say. The settings for the stories are left deliberately sketchy, leaving readers free to imagine their own. No two people are likely to imagine the same setting for any particular story, and different settings can change the nature of a story, so the words on the page are actually only part of the story – readers write the rest of it for themselves.
Half of the royalties John receives from sales of the book will go to charity, as explained in the Foreword to the book.
John Bunting 