James Warden was a teacher for forty years and retired in 2006. He now enjoys his retirement as much as he enjoyed his time in the education service and is catching up on those things which he left undone and ought to have done – in particular, his writing. He writes every morning between nine o’clock and noon, for thirty-six weeks of the year.He is fortunate enough to be able to act in several Norwich theatres – the Maddermarket, the Sewell Barn and, with the Great Hall Players, at the Assembly House – and this experience informs his writing. His stage adaptation of Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning was performed at the Sewell Barn Theatre in November 2009. His original play, Letters from a Boy in the Trenches, which was based on the letters of a WW1 soldier, was performed in Marchington, Staffordshire in 2015.James is married – for the second time – and lives in Norfolk. He and his wife travel as much as possible. They have visited Italy (where they were married in 2002) several times, Canada, Bermuda, Egypt, India, the Czech Republic, New England, Poland, Slovenia, Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, Alaska, the Galapagos Islands, Australia and Switzerland. In 2018, they travelled across the USA on Route 66. They have also taken several holidays in various Mediterranean resorts – the basis for his first novel, Three Women of a Certain Age, which was published in July 2010, and Bingham Goes to Cannes, to be published in 2024.During his years in education, he wrote about twenty play scripts for children. These included the one that formed the basis for his children’s story, The Great Gobbler and his Home Baking Factory at the North Pole, which he wrote in 1982 and published in December 2010.He has three sons by his first marriage, and they inspired two of his novels – The Vampire’s Homecoming, which was published in 2011, and The One-eyed Dwarf, published in 2012. With them and his first wife, he also travelled to the southern states of North America, France, Germany (West and East), Estonia and what was Czechoslovakia.
