ALISTAIR JOHNSON
‘The details of my life are quite inconsequential.’
Dr. Evil
Alistair was born in London in 1957. His father had come to England in 1944 from Jamaica to serve in the RAF. His mother was an English woman from a well to do family and the issues of race and class have been constant themes in Alistair’s life. He has picked these up in the novel and the heroine Tina is a self conscious alter ego, the very essence of everything racist ideology detests.
There are more particular biographical details as they relate to this work on the sister site and in the ‘outline’/history sections of this site.
After completing his anthropology degree Alistair took part in a cultural research project in Jamaica run by the Institute of Jamaica and the Organisation of American States. On his return to UK he started a three year research project into Youth Leisure Provision in Lewisham run by Lewisham Council, the Greater London Council and the Gulbenkian Foundation. By identifying that a key problem with the provision was the providers (his employers) his report was left unpublished.
A family crisis saw Alistair taking over his Mother’s business and also caring for her last foster child until he aged out after her death. Within months of that Alistair made the sort of bad business decisions that are typical of people who are grieving and spent a decade getting out of debt before moving to Canada where he spent another decade writing the novel.
Of all the day jobs he has taken scaffolding has been the most enduring and around that he has been able to design a way to retrofit sails to the world’s merchant fleet to save fuel for which he holds the US patent – www.dasivedo.com.