Linwood Barclay
Like all authors, bestselling, internationally acclaimed and award winning author Linwood Barclay had to start writing somewhere. Although he got his ‘career break’ when he began work with the small Ontario daily The Peterborough Examiner, the will to write had been evident from an early age, with the encouragement to continue being more or less self-driven. ‘I was a child of the 1960s, and loved TV, particularly shows like The Man from UNCLE and Mission: Impossible,’ the Connecticut-born writer explains.
‘An episode a week was not enough for me. I needed more stories about those characters, so I started writing them on my own. By the time I was twelve, I was writing novellas of thirty to forty typed pages – my father taught me how to type when I was ten. Later, however, I had at least one teacher who encouraged me, and I was lucky to have two established writers – Canada’s Margaret Laurence and famed crime novelist Ross Macdonald – take an interest in me. I started writing stories around age ten and I can’t say that anyone encouraged me, at least not at that age, and my greatest motivator back then was television.’