Anthony R Merrydew was born in Dorking England and educated at the Andrew Cairns boy’s school Littlehampton West Sussex where he developed amongst other things his love of English literature. As part of the curriculum he read many classics such as Laurie Lee’s ‘Cider with Rosie’, William Golding ‘Lord of the Flies’, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ which captivated him at the prospect of persecuting individualism and independent thinking. It was a novel that notably change his perception of society and those who controlled it.
Apart from literature, an early predilection for things of an electrical or mechanical nature soon had him standing in front of the headmaster. Electrifying the playground fence with a hand held generator was deemed unacceptable behaviour especially as the first year students were touching it at the time. The fascination for electricity remained though the generator was confiscated.
With the college years came the amazing discovery of alcohol, motorcycles and politics, but not necessarily in that order. After Worthing College there was a period of wandering and the revelation there were actually people living on the other side of the English Channel. Some of who were very political and liked alcohol as well. Feeling completely at home he spent the early seventies wandering around Europe visiting Switzerland and Corsica where he lived on the beach in Ajaccio for an entire summer. Later, he lived and worked in Besancon, Dijon and Marseille France where he wrote his first manuscript ‘Malakoff’, which remains to this day a work in progress. The love of reading and writing continued and over the decades that followed having returned to England and raised a family, he wrote poetry and several short stories mainly for friends and family.
His first published work ‘Our Blue Orange’ revolves around a fascination for automation and the world of data combined with a political backdrop laced with dry humour. The novel took eight years to complete in his spare time written mainly in hotels and rented rooms across the world whilst working on different contracts. After numerous re-writes it was published at the end of August 2015.
Anthony lives with his family at the foot of the Sierra Mijas mountain range in Andalucía and has plans for another book; the story is not yet complete. But for now he continues to run his own electrical consultancy commissioning data centers for some of the major players in the industry such as Emerson, Google and Facebook.
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