Martin Hilyard

Martin Hilyard is the son of a Polish father conscripted in 1943 into the German army and liberated during the Normandy landings. He was born in West Yorkshire but the family moved when he was very young to Devon, where he grew up. If asked, Martin thinks this accounts for the fact that he will watch and listen far more than speak and take part. He grew up a Catholic in a Methodist town. An incomer to a community where many families had lived since medieval times. A foreigner – he had a foreign name when growing up – in a school where only three children were not white and English. His father was a religious man and some of his earliest memories are of a church of sonorous Latin chants, incense, the chime of quiet bells summoning the divine. He wrote poetry in school, science-fiction later, mostly (completely) for his own enjoyment. And escape? Before going to university he went to India and the trip it filled him with restlessness. The Mughal palaces and imperial reminders of the Raj in Delhi. The mountain passes of the high Karakorams, the timelessness of Srinagar. The bustle and drama of Bombay at a time of food riots. Then university, a fairly sterile time but he loved the history he took, histories of unfamiliar countries and unremembered times. He settled in Liverpool in the 1980s and got involved in politics. He learned that we can't always change the world but in trying to the world may change us, and for the better. He came to understand what pride and despair taste like, the joy of solidarity, the bitterness of defeat. How resilient we can be if we believe in something. And how wherever he had gone he had been treated with kindness, though a stranger. While in Liverpool he became interested in role-playing games and began to create history-based sagas for the players to enjoy or curse in equal measure. He came to realise how much he enjoyed shaping worlds to his own design, then having that design overthrown by the ingenuity and courage of the characters that entered his world. Martin is now 64 years old. He has returned to writing to share through story-telling something of what he believes. He has a charming, homely, loving partner and they live in a forever home in Liverpool. Martin is personable, engaging, serious, a thinker and listener, gets on well with people, works hard and likes to write quickly and fluently. He likes nothing better than conversation. So if you're ever in Liverpool, stand him a pint on a Saturday afternoon.