Travis’s great-grandfather was a city librarian who read Dickens to his family around the fire at night; his grandfather told “Green Man stories” to his kids; his father put on hilarious skits. This helps to explain why Travis has spent decades working on his skills as a novelist.

Storytelling is in his blood.

Travis has a remarkable gift for observing the lives of Australians and re-presenting them in his stories.

For someone who nearly failed English in school and can honestly say that I had never read a book from cover to cover until I was about twenty years old, writing a novel was the last thing on my mind. I never sent cards at Christmas or birthdays, always preferring to phone my messages because I could never get my words out on paper.

In my late twenties, as I lay in a hot bath daydreaming one evening, for some unknown reason, I just had to write my thoughts down. At the time, I was working as a carpenter six days a week, ten hours a day. Despite my physical exhaustion, I hand-wrote about four pages every night for several weeks. After about one hundred and twenty pages, I realised I had the makings of a novel, so I bought a second-hand laptop and have been tapping away ever since. Thirty-odd years later, I have completed eight novels.