GET TO KNOW HAL HAMILTON AUTHOR

Hal Hamilton is a creation of my mind. My pseudonym or pen name comes from my middle name, Henry, and my maternal grandmother's maiden name, Hamilton - thus Hal Hamilton was born.

 

My real name is classified but I live in a rural Marlborough at the top of the South Island of New Zealand. Our home is nestled on a hill overlooking the vineyards and the beautiful mountains of the Richmond Range that are silhouetted every night as the kaleidoscopic sun sets behind them. It is a peaceful place far from the madding crowd.

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It is a place where the soul can connect with nature and where the mind can sore and it is the perfect place to get lost in the scribblings that become books. I have been writing for sometime but like many fledgling authors it was as a secondary or tertiary unpaid job as feeding my family always came first. I am married to a third generation Marlburian whose family have farmed the same land for over a hundred years. Together we have three wonderful children who love the great outdoors.

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During the COVID lockdowns my sons and I built a small shack on the hill amongst the forest that became my writing cabin where I tinker away when I can but mostly my writing is done in the early hours when the house sleeps and before I start my day job which is designing fabulous landscapes.

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My writing style is a mix between commercial and literature prose where details count and elegant composition matters. It makes for easy but thoughtful reading that reflects the historic era represented in the books.

 

Outside of writing and designing I enjoy riding my Royal Enfield Himalayan, hunting and fishing for wild game in the stunning landscapes around New Zealand. Our yellow lab, Skye, and her friend Ziggy the cat, generously allow us to tag along on their walks along the river and through the vineyards.

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I grew up in Suffolk, England where I attended Orwell Park School and then to Tonbridge School where I studied History, Classical Civilisation and Geography for A levels.

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In the post school world I found freedom and adventure in the travel bug of the early to mid 1990s. I travelled around India and Nepal with a great friend before going to the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of London where I studied Nepalese language, South Asian Culture, human geography of Asia and Africa and physical geography of the tropics.

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After my stint at SOAS I saved up and went backpacking around the world for a year enjoying Asia and Australia particularly. I then studied Geology at the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science where I graduated with an honours degree. Since then I have journeyed from the UK to Australia in a Land Rover Defender 130, raising funds for orphans along the way. 

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It was during this adventure that I discovered a passion for writing. It was in the old days before smart phones and global cellular reception so I had to send my travel stories back to the UK media via a satellite phone at a mighty 9.6mbps capacity. The whizzing and whirring of the modem is a familiar if not painful memory to us veterans of the early days of connectivity.

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These were some of the very first live travel blogs to hit the Internet. Sony sponsored us a digital camera. It was their first and it took a 31/2 inch floppy disk in the back to save up to five low resolution images - talk about state of the art!

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British Telecom sponsored a live tracker that sent a location every hour to the website so our followers could track the progress - talk about technological advances!

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Since then I have written for landscape and travel magazines as well being a regularly contributor to Stuff (an NZ based media outlet) writing columns about design that were sold far and wide on the ether.

 

I was for a few years a mad ultra marathon runner, and I have always been a man who likes to do everything himself, to be self reliant and a jack of all trades. There are many other details that I won't bore you with but I hope that gives you an inkling as to who I am and from I came.