My early education was at St Columba’s College, St Alban’s, where I was a student for 10 years. After taking two degrees at Warwick and my doctorate at Sussex my first book was published in 1999. This full-length monograph was published along with my other book published that year under the subtitle – Cultural Ontology Volumes I and II.

These books reflected my earlier work in philosophy and culture. They tackled a variety of subjects, such as free will and mediated fate in relation to the work of Jean Baudrillard, film and ‘madness’, and constructions of otherness.

With regards to otherness, my early work had a theological bent and this continued in my 2005 monograph Pervasive Perversions (Free Association Books). As well as working on book length projects on transgressive themes, I also had shorter work published on film and conspiracy culture.

In my much earlier career in London, Liverpool and abroad in Croatia, I worked in social work and training in counselling, wellbeing and addiction. These experiences fed into my later academic work, such as the edited collection Cultures of Addiction (Cambria) and into my creative projects, such as the three novels Unholy Days, Dr Cipriano’s Cell and Spit Roast. They also gave good grounding to my later work in psychology and chartered membership of the British Psychological Society.