Robert Goddard was born in Hampshire in 1954. He was educated at Price’s School, Fareham, and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read History. After qualifying as a teacher, he worked as a local government officer for ten years before becoming a full-time novelist.
Robert Goddard describes how and why he became a writer:
I was a writer, in the sense of being a storyteller - an avid elaborator and refashioner of events for my own and others’ entertainment - from my childhood on. I was also an eager student of history, spending every Saturday I could in the local reference library poring over history books in a bid to understand the world I grew up in. These two impulses - to alter reality and also to master it - are the foundations of my fiction. At that time, I also thought being a novelist would be enormously glamorous. I imagined myself emerging from steam-wreathed railway stations in exotic locations with a typewriter and a whisky bottle in my bag, a knowing smile playing around my lips.
Glamour is actually in short supply for novelists, other than what figures in the stories they create. So is financial security, of course, which is why I tried, soberly and sensibly, to apply myself to other career options after university, only to discover that I wasn’t cut out for any of them. It became painfully clear that I was a writer or nothing. But what sort of writer?
I was frustrated and disappointed by a lot of contemporary fiction I read in the 1970s and 1980s, so I set out to write a novel that did what I wanted more novels to do: tell a tightly constructed and densely plotted story engrossingly and satisfyingly. This involves a lot of planning, a part of the process I enjoyed greatly from the start. Naturally, it also requires a central idea for the story to grow from.
I recall worrying during the writing of that first book, Past Caring, that ideas for future books might be hard to come by. But it hasn’t worked out like that. One idea seems to give birth to another. It’s become an addictive occupation, for me and, I’m glad to say, for many of my readers. And it’s not an addiction I have any intention of trying to kick. I’m in it for life.
