Richard Platt's biography

An inventive editor once wrote that I was “born in a storm-tossed rowing boat…” but sadly, the truth is more mundane! I was born in a hospital in Northumberland; my mother was a pharmacist and my father a civil engineer. I spent most of my childhood in an ordinary house in a south London suburb.

Life began to get interesting when I left secondary school. I spent a year on a student exchange at the Gunnery school in Connecticut, then returned to the UK to study civil engineering. I was rubbish at this, so I switched to a design degree course. Photography was my passion, and I never went anywhere without a camera. After graduating I worked for a small London gallery called Camerawork, then began writing a column in a monthly photography magazine.

My first book

The first book I wrote was on photography, too. It terrified me! I had never written more than about 1,000 words at a time, and now I had to come up with 80,000. Worse still, I didn’t have much time to do it. And I had a full-time job. Somehow, I managed it, though I didn’t sleep much.

Books for children

My first really successful book was a collaboration with illustrator Stephen Biesty: Incredible Cross Sections. It sold more than a million copies for publishers Dorling Kindersley, and the Guardian later chose it as one of the three greatest children’s books of the 1990s. I went on to write 32 books for DK.

I worked for other clients, too, on a variety of projects that were very different from conventional children’s books. I wrote advertising copy for Ilford Photo and Parker Pens. I worked on multimedia projects, including a CD-ROM version of Sophie’s World, and some comic animations for a museum in Waterford, Ireland. I wrote restaurant reviews for the Automobile Association (I put on 4kg doing this, because writing about food made me hungry.)

Parental guidance

I thought I was doing pretty well by now: I had a car and a flat; I had met a wonderful woman and got married. However, my mum brought me down to earth. When I showed her my latest book, she glanced at it and asked "When are you going to write a real book, Darling?" I tried harder after that.

Gradually, themes have emerged in my writing. I have become an amateur expert on the sea, and especially on smuggling and piracy. (My website, smuggling.co.uk, is the top source for British smuggling information.) I have also become fascinated by social history and by the history of science and technology.

However, I will – and do – write about almost anything, because it’s the variety and diversity of my work that I enjoy.

When I'm not writing...

...I'm likely to be out on my bike cycling round country lanes near my home ... or making bread... or fiddling with some computer code (I'm a closet geek, and built this website myself) ... or gardening with my wife Mary. We live in rural Kent. We have a little black cat, and five chickens called Maisie, Molly, Dolly, Aphrodite and Tikka.

Want to know EVEN MORE?!

An exhaustive biography at Answers.com tells you more about me than even I can remember!