User:MWysocki/sandbox

Mark James Barrett (born July 7th 1968) is a Freelance Writer, Author and Screenwriter.

Mark didn't start writing until his late twenties, and after struggling with his craft, decided to enrol at University in 2006. He graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in 2011 with an MA in Creative Writing. Since then, his short fiction has been published in a number of magazines, and his story The Jenny Museum  was short-listed to the final six for the International Aeon Award Short Fiction Contest.

His first long work of fiction, the Dreams of the Black Butterfly, was short listed for The Impress Prize and was printed by Matador Publishing in February 2016. He plans it to be the first part of a trilogy, but is currently working on another project, a novel set in England and Poland.

His literary influences include Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, Philip K Dick, Graham Greene and George Orwell. His love of reading and writing was ignited at the age of sixteen, by an English teacher who forced him to read The Sound of Thunder and The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury. Nothing was ever the same again.

Aside from writing, Mark enjoys hiking the mountains of Europe, has run the Berlin Marathon in an embarrassingly long finishing time, and occasionally paints in oils. He has a Banjo he stares at a lot but never picks up. He dreams for far too long before action.

Mark lives in West Yorkshire with his wife Victoria, their daughters Lara and Isabella, and a nervous cat called Dorothy.