Tom Allen
Novelist. Five books about ground, water, and the people who stay.
"Leadership isn't a title. It's a choice you make in the moment that matters."
Tom was born in 1973 in the hills of West Virginia and served in the U.S. Air Force, where he first learned that how you respond under pressure matters more than how fast you move. Today, the leadership role he's proudest of is at home: husband to his wife and dad to three grown kids, two sons and a daughter, who have heard most of these stories more times than they'd like to admit.
I was born in 1978 in a house that is no longer there, on a stretch of the Solway coast that loses about a metre of itself a year. My family were not writers. My grandfather kept horses and my mother taught primary school and grew things in a lean-to she built herself out of a library book and my uncle’s second-best tools. Both of those facts have turned up in books since, wearing different coats.
I read Geology at Aberdeen because I liked the maps, and spent eleven years working on ground investigations — logging boreholes, writing factual reports, standing in fields in February with a clipboard while somebody drilled. It is not a literary apprenticeship anybody would design. It taught me two things I have never got out of my prose: that the interesting failure is the slow one, and that the most frightening sentence in the English language is a perfectly neutral description of what is about to happen.
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On the books
Ostler came out in 2009 and sold about eleven hundred copies, and I have never been happier about anything. Small Hours is eleven stories written mostly on night shifts. The Glasshouse Winter took four years and two abandoned drafts. Nine Days of Rain is the one people write to me about.
The Weathering is out in September. It is the book I have been circling since I was nine years old and standing on a bridge being told something true by my brother, and I do not expect to write another one like it.
Elsewhere
I review occasionally, teach one week a year at Moniack Mhor, and answer letters slowly. I do not do panels about whether the novel is dead.
