S W Perry is the pen name of former journalist and broadcaster Steve Perry Wood. A youthful ambition to be an actor was, probably mercifully, curtailed when, at an audition with the National Youth Theatre, he forgot the entire abdication speech from Richard II that he’d been learning during school break.

Steve joined Radio 210 in 1977 as a trainee news reporter. He went on to work for LBC, presenting news programmes and reading the news on IRN, the ITN of the commercial radio network. In the early eighties, he indulged his passion for flying and gained his commercial pilot’s license. Leaving broadcasting behind, he took up aviation and spent the next thirty years flying for a living, ending up as a senior captain with a major UK leisure airline, carrying holidaymakers to the sunshine all over the world. Steve is married to Jane, an ex-teacher. They live with Raffles, their cocker spaniel, in rural Worcestershire.

The Angel’s Mark, S W Perry’s debut novel, is published by Corvus Books. It features a young, idealistic physician, Nicholas Shelby, who becomes enmeshed in a world of conspiracy and murder in the dark side of Elizabethan London when he has cause to question the veracity of sixteenth-century medical knowledge. A sequel is due out in 2019.