Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I was born in North London, and spent my schooldays playing football or looking out of the window wishing I was somewhere else.
After failing to make the grade as a professional football player, I spent much my twenties traveling, hitch-hiking around Europe and North Africa before heading to Asia. My experiences in Bangkok and India later inspired the thriller VENOM, and my adventures in the jungles of the Golden Triangle of Burma and Laos were also filed away for later, the basis of the OPIUM series about the underworld drug trade.
I moved to Australia and worked in advertising, before moving to Sydney where I freelanced for most of Australia’s leading newspapers and magazines, as well as working in radio and television.
After the publication of VENOM in 1990, I became a full time novelist. I have now published over 40 books and my work has sold into translation in 23 countries.
I lived for many years in the beautiful Margaret River region in WA, and helped raise two beautiful daughters with my late wife, Helen. While writing, I also worked in the volunteer ambulance service for over 13 years.
I travel regularly to research my novels and the quest for authenticity has led me to run with the bulls in Pamplona, pursue tornadoes across Oklahoma and black witches across Mexico, go cage shark diving in South Africa and get tear gassed in a riot in La Paz. I also completed a nine hundred kilometre walk of the camino in Spain a journey described in The Year We Seized the Day.
I did not publish for over five years but returned to writing in 2010 with the release of SILK ROAD, and STIGMATA the following year. ISABELLA was published in 2013 and became a huge bestseller.
I liken my fiction most closely to Ken Follett and Wilbur Smith – books with romance and high adventure, drawn from many periods of history.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
NAKED IN HAVANA started with a letter from one of my readers:
‘… I would also truly love to learn what REALLY happened in the 50’s with Cuba. Something tells me that it wasn’t truly like what the teachers told us in school in Canada. I read a fictional book a long time ago about Marilyn, John, Bobby & Frank, that touched on the Che Guevara/ Fidel Castro story, but just not enough to satisfy me …’
‘Can you write a book about that?’ she wrote.
And because it intrigued me, I said I would.
The story of pre-revolutionary Havana appealed to the romantic in me; I had always been a fan of those big romantic movies like Casablanca and Gone with the Wind and my mind’s eye fixed on a sweeping love saga that would follow the winds of change of an entire decade, from Havana and Castro’s takeover of Cuba to Jack Kennedy’s Malibu hideaway, the Hollywood of Monroe and Sinatra, to the final days of war-torn Saigon, an epic with larger than life fictional characters, as well as real life legends.
That was the vision.
And as I researched more, the background did not disappoint; NAKED IN HAVANA is about Cuba before Castro took over, about the Mafia and the casinos, about Kennedy and Monroe and Che Guevara and that whole darkly glamorous story that ended with JFK’s assassination. It’s about glitzy mob-run nightclubs, gun runners, revolutionaries and torchy voiced bolero singers.
But I wanted a love story at its heart; two people who had only ever wanted love on their own terms, but now would have to give up everything to be with each other.
Passion changes us, and love is dangerous. It makes us reject our own sacred beliefs, turn our back on our own kind, do the unthinkable. It can ask more of us than we might ever think to give; it can also heal us more than we ever imagined. And you never quite know which it will be until it is too late to turn back.
That’s how NAKED IN HAVANA was born.
And that’s why when Reyes sees Magdalena in Havana in 1958 he knew that running guns in the middle of a revolution was the least of his troubles …
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Follett, Wilbur Smith’s early stuff. James Clavell.
What are you working on now?
A big historical called Fever Coast.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Another big historical called Fever Coast.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Don’t even think about promotion until you’ve written at least 3 books. Work hard. Study! Learn! Get up at 7 and wait for inspiration. If it’s not there by five past, start without it.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Bob Mayer: ‘the reader is God.’
What are you reading now?
Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Next month I publish a novel called East India. It’s like a seventeenth century Titanic.
Then I’m going to Mozambique and India to finish research for Fever Coast.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
‘How To Build your Own Raft’, ‘Surviving in the Wild for Dummies’ and ‘The National Geographic Guide to Poisonous Snakes.’
Author Websites and Profiles
Colin Falconer Website
Colin Falconer Amazon Profile
Colin Falconer’s Social Media Links
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