Frank Graves
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Frank Graves is an author and film producer raised in South Africa and is the great grandson of Sir Thomas Maclear named as one of the foremost royal astronomers at the Cape of Good Hope. He is also distantly related to Robert Graves the renowned writer and poet who was a large inspiration for Frank to eventually take up writing. Robert Graves encouraged Frank to start writing with several correspondence letters and stories while still a boy at school.
Frank went on to become a Structural Engineer and owned several businesses before leaving South Africa to settle first in Scotland in 1976 then in England in 1986. From initially being a part time author and script writer, he has become a full time writer and film producer based at Pinewood Studios.
His first published work in 1989 was a fictional thiller named African Chess and was loosely based on his South African upbringing and the then apartheid system.
Next major work published by Marshall Cavendish in 1992 was The Ancestral Trail and was 'split' into two halves, of 26 issues each, making a total of 52 issues in all with consecutive page and issue numbers. (Graves did not himself write the text for Ancestral Trail. After his original manuscript was deemed unacceptable by Marshall Cavendish, author Fergus Fleming was drafted in to write the first 26 issues, and author Ian Probert was employed to write and edit the next 26 issues). The first half, published throughout 1993, takes place within a mythological Ancestral World, and describes a boy’s struggle to restore good to the world. After the initial international run which sold over 30 million copies worldwide, the second half of that series was then created. The second half, published in 1994, takes place in the totally different Cyber Dimension, and is about the boy’s attempt to find a way back to his own world. This work has become cultish with various parts continally being traded globally from with in the Internet Auction Rooms. Each issue centered on an adventure against a particular adversary, and each issue ended on a cliffhanger. Graves has now completed the full trilogy of works, the second part being Long Ago & Far Away which is supposedly due to be filmed and also published in similar format sometime in 2007 and the third part named The Myth-Maker. The Ancestral Trail group of books are primarily aimed at at younger audience. Further completed works include "The Culling", "Masterbug", "Family von Frank" & "Apes in Capes".
Other projects include his film work including the original idea about hydrogen fuel which then became a film called Chain Reaction starring Morgan Freeman and Keanu Reeves. "The Beastery" written and filmed in 2001.
Recently some more of his work has come to light and has been added in the form of a humorous African Dictionary called Effrikaan Deeksunree that is a phonetic take on how people from Africa translate the words to English if it were a readable format.
