Escalator Literature winner 2009: Robert Mason

Biography:

Robert Mason has worked as a successful illustrator and lecturer since 1976. He has written extensively on Illustration, and started writing fiction in 2005. Ant Farm, his first novel, was set in an unnamed provincial art school. He is currently working on The Rec. This crime novel is set in Kent in the late Sixties, and questions established notions of Kent as being the bucolic garden of England, the Sixties offering the (first) summer of love and of things being only grim up North. Robert’s illustration, painting and other writing can be seen at www.masonillustration.co.uk

‘He stood there, extremely wary, fifty yards or so from the edge of the quarry. His hair was blowing about above his earnest, pink mush, and the long grass was whipping around his legs in the stiff breeze. I opened the door slowly and the wind caught it, nearly tore the handle from my grasp. A long way off a dog barked, but apart from that the wind was the only noise. No cars, no tractors. Even if there had been, I doubt if I would have stopped what I was about to do. I don’t think that I could have.’