Biography of Banquet Speaker

Pete Davies 41 years old married with 2 children, Joe, 10, and Megan, 7 grew up on the south coast of England - my father was an officer in the Royal Navy - educated at Bryanston School and Oxford University - and now resident in West Yorkshire

I wrote my first novel in 1978, at the age of nineteen, while studying English Literature & Language at Oxford. It was absolute nonsense. After graduating, I spent nine months working as a cocktail barman for Richard Branson, then wrote a second novel, and that was pretty awful too. Seeking enlightenment, I wrote advertisements for feminine hygiene products for two and a half years, before flying to Morocco in May of 1984.

The room on the roof of the hotel in Rabat cost $1 a night. The first draft of The Last Election, a deranged satirical thriller about Thatcherism, was written there in two weeks. The novel was sold for a staggering advance of about $750. Apoplexy was induced in the publishers when every cent of it was immediately spent on a plane ticket to Lima. After two months in Peru and Bolivia, the novel was handed in three days ahead of deadline, and I've been making a living out of writing ever since.

I wrote a second novel - based on experiences travelling in Nicaragua, Kenya, and the USA - then moved into non-fiction, on the grounds that so much goes on in the world that you couldn't ever make up (and the money's better).

I've since written eight books beside the novels, variously about sport, politics, travel, and science. My ninth book, Catching Cold, is about the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, and recent efforts to retrieve the genetic footprint of the virus that caused it. It was a hugely enjoyable exercise, affording me an opportunity to convey a lot of information about virology in layman's terms, in the context a gripping story about a historic disaster, and current efforts to prevent such a disaster recurring.

My tenth book will be published in New York and London in August 2000 by Henry Holt and Michael Joseph respectively. It's about hurricanes, and will be called The Devil's Music in the UK, and Inside The Hurricane in the US. After some initial research in the British Library, the book began taking form out of a visit to Honduras in March and April 1999 to look at what Mitch had done.

A visit to NHC and HRD in Miami in May set me on course for the rest of the research; I then lived on Miami Beach from the end of July through October, and was privileged to fly with HRD in both Bret and Floyd. With Mitch, and then Irene on the ground in Miami, those four storms give the book its backbone.

As with Catching Cold, the idea is to use gripping reportage to introduce the general reader to at least a fair dose of hard science. The book covers the history of forecast methods, explains how computer models work, runs through the kinds of experiment carried out by HRD inside storms - it may be the first layman's book in history to attempt to explain what a step-frequency passive radiometer does - and concludes with an exposition of the work now foretelling an increase in major hurricane activity over the next couple of decades.