About the author
About the Author
Ryan Pope
“They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on,
when somebody mentions your name for the last time.”
I have always been fascinated by history, largely because of how impermanent we all are.
It’s a thought that is as comforting as it is terrifying that we will one day be forgotten.
Terrifying because all of our hard-won labours will one day cease to exist and all those little details of us and everyone we know will be gone forever. Comforting because all of our mistakes and fears and regrets will be forgotten too, at least for those of us lucky enough to be so unmemorable.
If that’s not a freeing thought, then I don’t know what is.
So, while we both exist under the same sun for this short time, a little bit about me.
I’ve been a curriculum editor, marketing content writer, an academic journal editer and have written and edited for magazines and story collections. In short, that’s a fancy way of saying I spend too much time in front of the screen and I see the Microsoft Word interface in my dreams (or rather nightmares?). But where my love of language truly resonates is in storytelling. It always has and I am fortunate enough to know that it always will.
Combining writing and history has led me to collecting books on all periods, from medieval knights and castles to the Roman Legions to the building of the Great Pyramid and over to the Aztecs. The novels too stacked up into precarious towers around my bedroom (still do to be honest) with names like Conn Iggulden, Wilbur Smith, Christian Jacq, Simon Scarrow, Robyn Young, Mika Waltari taking me through time to distant lands and cultures.
The everyday lives of people throughout time feel both so accessible, yet foreign, though there is a strange comfort in knowing that all cultures, in all places, in all times have all loved, hoped and feared like we do now. Times of peace and prosperity are wonderful to live in, but they make poor stories.
I live in Australia, funnily enough because I was born here, and come with all of the usual stereotypes. I believe BBQ cooking makes everything taste better, think beer is one of mankind’s greatest inventions, and consider five days a perfectly acceptable length for one game of cricket. I also think Vegemite is delicious (just don’t have it as thick as peanut butter – seriously a thin scrape is fine), snakes and spiders are less dangerous than drop bears, and that we should all cherish the history of our world as it has brought us this far, even as we should learn from the more unsavoury parts.
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