Jonathan Falkner

I was born in Farnborough, Hampshire and grew up in Seascale on the Cumbrian coast, learning to sail in dinghies launched off the beach. For about ten years I worked for NatWest Bank, during which time I met and married Sheila. (We were fellow members of a music group at St Cuthbert’s Church, Seascale.) We moved to Durham in 1976 to attend Cranmer Hall theological college and I was ordained in 1979, serving curacies in Penrith and Dalton in Furness, then as vicar of Clifton and Dean, between Workington and Cockermouth (all in Cumbria).

A big change came in 1990, when we moved to a group of very rural parishes near Bungay in north Suffolk. I have written about this period on the ‘Affinity’ page. It was during our time there that the possibility of writing a story set on the Broads began to take hold.

In 1999 we returned to Cumbria, and after my retirement in 2012 (back in Seascale) I unpacked all the old notebooks of my observations and started to plan the novel. Progress was sporadic until 2020, when I made a determined effort to write, revise and complete the story, which was eventually published in June 2021. (We still enjoy sailing and canoeing, and still play in Christian music groups locally.)