Ed Siegle was born in Minehead and grew up in Somerset and Dorset. After studying Languages at Cambridge University, he moved to London where he worked as a business consultant for a number of years before moving to Brighton. Ed still lives in Brighton with his wife and their children.
Languages have been the great love of Ed’s life. Discovering he had a knack for Spanish, he spent teenage summers on exchange visits to a small town near Valencia. He has since spent extended periods in Spain and Latin America – travelling through El Salvador and Nicaragua during their 80s wars, teaching English at the Universidad de Granada in Spain, and acting as an interpreter on an expedition to the Venezuelan rainforest. His command of languages also led to work in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where the idea of his first novel Invisibles was born.
Ed wrote much of the first draft of his novel on a daily commute from Brighton to London. He has written a number of short stories, of which ‘On the Level’ was published in The Illustrated Brighton Moment, and ‘Nine Lives, One Life’ won the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize. He has read at a number of live events including The Brighton Moment, Sparks and GritLit.
'I don’t like to have everything mapped out, as a lot of the pleasure comes from daily discovery and invention – sitting down with a notion of what I’d like to engineer and ending up with something new.'
Read an interview with Ed Siegle on the Deckchair website.
'I started writing Invisibles having recently returned to the UK, to Brighton, after living and working in Rio. I had a strong sense of saudade – a Portuguese word for an intense feeling of longing – for my life there, and so it made sense to write a novel about someone with a similar feeling.'
Read an interview with Ed Siegle on Booksquawk.