Michael Cannon had an unhappy schooling in the West of Scotland and left with a clutch of poor qualifications. He started a job as a trainee in the Tax Office in the civil service, a position that he found both boring and difficult. At the age of twenty-two Cannon started work at Sullom Voe oil terminal in the Shetlands, in a job that saw him doing no less than sixty seven hours a week. Although well paid, it was a shift system that saw him working twenty-eight days on and seven days off, but he realised that without further education he would never be able to progress. He decided to enrol at a further education college in order to gain the necessary qualifications to enter university. He then spent a summer working at a Kibbutz before returning to read English literature. After graduating he secured a post at Strathclyde University where his role predominately involved negotiating intellectual property contracts. Although he still works at Strathclyde University (as a “liaison between academia and industry”) he claims that his three published works were written after hours. The Borough was published in 1995 and A Conspiracy of Hope was in 1996, both by Serpents Tail. Cannon’s latest book, Lachlan’s War, was published in Autumn 2006 by Viking. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies of Scottish Short Fiction.