(Or where he gets to speak about himself in the third person)
Ivan was born in Madrid and spent his earliest years mixing gin and tonics, swimming with turtles, playing football and inventing games with rules that only he understood. He was going to be a footballer. Or run a bar. And that was that.
Aged 8, he made the unusual decision to leave his parents and younger brothers behind to live in England with his grandmother and uncle. Here he was faced with a strange, new world full of double glazing, bureaucracy, television and roundabouts. He read. A lot. He changed his mind. He was going to be a writer, and that was that.
He wrote a little, while trying to be, among other things, a film student, musician, doorman, disco-light assembler and for four brief but memorable hours, a maggot farm operative. He found success in online publishing and marketing, but told anyone that would listen that it was only temporary.
Fifteen years later, he realised that he had a career he didn’t want. So he packed it in, enrolled on a creative writing course and learnt to dream again. And that, as they say, is that.
He now spends as much time writing as he can the duende allows and lives with his wife in West London. They have no cats.
Contact via email at blog AT monkquixote DOT com.