AUTHOR PROFILE
TA Williams
The prolific author shares the secrets behind his success with Margaret James
Margaret James
The novelist TA Williams – Trevor to his family and friends – is a prolific author of women’s interest fiction. I first came across one of his many titles a few years ago, and it’s been a pleasure to find out more about him.
How did his writing journey begin?
‘I started writing in my early teens,’ he says.
‘I still have all 44 handwritten pages of The Lake Dwellers, which was a shameless rip-off of Arthur Ransom’s Swallows and Amazons.
Later, in my twenties and thirties, when I had an increasingly stressful day job running a big language school, I wrote some thrillers as relaxation. One of these, The Man of Blood, got publishers Collins (this was in pre-HarperCollins times) quite excited. But then I received a letter telling me that due to the parlous economic situation in the country, they felt they could not take on a new author. Then I got hooked on reading and writing mediaeval historical fiction, but these novels met with no success with publishers or agents.