After completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge University at the age of 23, David took off and has lived in many countries and through many dynamic times - Berkeley, California in the Sixties, China during the Cultural Revolution, Malaysia, France, Australia... Twenty years at Murdoch University (Western Australia) culminated in a Professorship and Chair at the City University of New York. He took early retirement in 2000. He speaks French, German, and (rusty) Russian and Chinese. A well-published and respected academic, David has published six books - on Asian theatre and Buddhist thought, and is also a prize-winning playwright who has received grants and commissions from the French and Italian governments, and whose plays have been performed throughout Australia and as far afield as Moscow. Together these two quite different forms of writing now enrich his novels, infusing them with the meticulous detail learnt from the rigours of research, as well as an expertise in realising fictional worlds and their characters, the legacy of many years writing for and directing theatre. His previous attempts at writing novels all showed great promise: Thomas Nelson called Innocence (a novel about the Children's Crusade) "wonderfully written," Harper Collins "intriguing and emotive." Houghton Mifflin called Red Snow (a Chinese love-story) "a creative and imaginative novel," Hodder and Stoughton "he writes brilliantly," Random House "an ambitious, original project." Houghton Mifflin called Eyebabies "a wonderful story... simultaneously disturbing and alluring, original and familiar... every so often a project comes along that I just can't stop in the middle and yours was one of those." Katherine Greenwood of Bloomsbury Publishing called Eyebabies: "an absorbing story, with strong and beguiling characters." Retitled How Mao Died, Red Snow was published in 2003 by Red Swallow Press and Amazon., as was The Crusade of Innocents. How Mao Died was translated and republished in Indonesia by Kompas Gramedia in 2008. It has now been completely rewritten and is being reissued to mark the upcoming 40th anniversary of Mao's death.