Who I am, what I do

I grew up in the UK but my home and my playground is Berlin. The shape of my working life has always been the same: several things held together at once, with the combination being the point.

In my Glasgow years I was studying philosophy at the university and writing a column in the student paper about the city's club scene, which led to throwing my own parties across the city, joining the team behind a members-only queer night at a warehouse on an industrial estate that appeared in a BBC documentary series about the UK’s most exciting underground club nights, and eventually a job at the Sub Club working alongside Harri and Domenic, Optimo and many other key figures in global club culture.

In my final years of university I was editing the student paper, putting in 50 or 60 hour weeks on top of my degree, and in 2004 the paper won several Guardian Student Journalism Awards for the first time in its recent history. I was also awarded the Edward Caird Medal in philosophy. None of it felt like balancing. It felt like the work I was meant to be doing.

The London years followed the same shape. JWT during the week, a music podcast presented by Tom Ravenscroft at weekends, always a project on the go. Later, at Story Worldwide, where I worked closely with the senior team across briefs that ranged from blue-chip campaigns to specialist not-for-profit work, I led the agency's biggest pitches and worked across creative disciplines on the kind of briefs that needed both intellectual frameworks and emotional landing. One project, an interactive film for The Havens about sexual consent, won a Cannes Lion, was used as a training tool by UK police forces for years afterwards, and prompted a parliamentary question. It was a zero-budget YouTube hack a designer-developer and I made over a weekend pro bono — the kind of work the agency was capable of when it was at its best.

But the agency itself didn't make it: its business model was less robust than its creative output, and over my last years I watched it gradually unravel before being absorbed into a larger network. Seeing a creative environment fail at the structural level even while producing some of the best work of my life shaped how I think now about the conditions creative work needs in order to last.

Berlin, since 2013, has been the same pattern in a different city. The novel and the consulting work and a continuing involvement with cultural projects all happen at the same time, often informing each other in ways that are clear in retrospect and not always at the time.

Fiction

My debut novel FOLK was published in 2025 by Velocity Press and longlisted for the McKitterick Prize. I'm at work on a second novel and a short story collection. Earlier this year I appeared at Faversham Literary Festival in conversation with Emma Warren. I am represented by Sharmaine Lovegrove at International Creative Agency.

Communications consulting

My consulting work is built around long-term editorial partnerships. The pattern I've found is that the work goes best with clients who are themselves serious about communications, who have senior people willing to engage in real editorial conversation, and who recognise that voice is built through hundreds of small decisions made consistently over time rather than through one-off interventions.

These are usually clients in the second tier of visibility — companies operating at meaningful scale in their sectors but without the marketing apparatus of the largest players. The combination of substantive work, considered cultures, and direct access to decision-makers produces engagements I've come to value. The relationships tend to be embedded rather than transactional, often working closely with one or two senior stakeholders who hold editorial authority and want a thinking partner alongside them.

The work itself usually combines strategic communications with craft execution. Editorial content, internal and external voice, brand and communications systems, the language that organisations need to talk about themselves in a moment of change. Increasingly the work is also about helping clients hold quality and discipline in an era when many of the alternatives produce a flatter, more generic output.

The work

The combination is the point. Fiction lets me follow the question of language and belonging where it wants to go. Consulting lets me bring the same attention to organisations trying to say something true about themselves. Each is stronger for the other existing. I live in Berlin with my partner and our three children.

I am always open to new collaborations.