Howard Headworth retired to southern Spain twenty years ago. He was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, and trained as a geologist at Aberystwyth and Imperial College. He is a hydrogeologist by profession, having spent most of his career in southern England where, after water privatisation in 1989, he became managing director of Southern Science, an environmental company within the Southern Water plc group. With his wife, Sarah Steines, he is the author of an English/Spanish and Spanish/English Dictionary of Environmental Science and Engineering published by John Wiley and Sons in 1998. The former Moorish kingdom of Andalucía fascinated him on his arrival in Spain and he has written two historic novels covering the years before and after the fall of Granada in 1492 to the Christian monarchs, Isabel and Fernando. The Al-Andalus Chronicle and Spain's Pursuit of Destiny are both translated into Spanish in Al-Andalus, Sus Últimos Años, and España en la Búsqueda de Su Destino. All four books are published by New Generation Publishing. His fourteen short stories in Civilisations and Conspiracies range freely through space and time with some thought-provoking and tongue-in-cheek themes.