James Bibby

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James Bibby is a fantasy author.

He has been a TV comedy writer for a number of years working with both Chris Tarrant and Lenny Henry. He lives in Claughton with his family. James Bibby was born in Birkenhead on the Wirral in 1953. It was a shock for his mother, who was in Manchester at the time. A childhood spent devouring books and listening to every comedy show going resulted in a desire to be a writer and so (after leaving what is now JM University, Liverpool, with a dodgy degree in Ecology) he settled down to write the definative children's novel. Six months later, after producing a mere thirty pages and nearly dying from starvation, he decided he'd better get a real job.

Having spent four years at college learning how to save small, furry creatures, it made perfect sense to kill a few instead, and so he joined a well-known pest control company. Mediocrity beckoned, until a small sketch sent in to the BBC was used on Not the Nine O'Clock News (it was based around the well-known Ready-Brek advert and claimed that the warmly-glowing kid in it was radioactive). This resulted in an invitation to join the writing team on Three of a Kind, and then OTT (the adult follow-up to Tiswas).

Other TV work followed, and so in 1990 he took the big step of leaving the day-job and becoming a full-time writer. Of course, the TV work then dried up completely. However, after an idea for a fantasy comedy that he had been working on for Humphrey Barclay was turned down by ITV, he decided to adapt it into a novel. This became Ronan the Barbarian, published by Orion in 1995. Three more books set in the fantasy world of "Midworld" followed.

In 1999, with a wife in a full-time job and with four children (two of whom were below school age), he slipped quietly into the role of full-time Dad. The idea had been to spend an hour or two a day working on a fifth novel, but the kids had other ideas, and for a while the world of smelly Pampers, temper tantrums and bed-time stories dominated. He did however find the time to write four specially-commissioned short stories for Mike Ashley's Mammoth fantasy collections.

Now, in 2006, with the youngest child in school and with a little more time to himself, he has returned to the fifth novel. With the working title of "The Lie-in, the Watch and the Weird Robe", it is a fantasy novel set in small-town Britain, and is about one-third written. Sadly, he still hasn't finished the children's novel he started 30 years ago...

[edit] Short stories

• 1. Fall'n Into The Sear (The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy, 1998)
  2. Pale Assassin (The Mammoth Book Of Awesome Comic Fantasy, 2001)
  3. The Power And The Gory (The Mammoth Book Of New Comic Fantasy, 2004)
  4. The Last Witch (The Mammoth Book Of Sorcerers' Tales, 2005)