Michael Welland

Well, not so much a biography, as some thoughts.As a geologist, I have been fortunate enough to see diverse and wonderful parts of our planet. Its workings and processes are a never-ending source of fascination, and demonstrate what is intoxicating about science - the provocative conspiracy between what we know and what we don't. All too often, science is presented as done and dusted, whereas the fascination is the vast realm of what we don't know. All too often, we think we know more than we do, and that can get us into trouble. And, being of a certain age, I treasure the time available to enquire into the endlessly compelling amount of stuff that I, personally, don't know. I hope that this comes through in my books, that the reader will be surprised and entertained at what sand, an apparently mundane material, has to tell us and what the words 'the desert' mean to us culturally, historically, and in the imagination - and how different the meaning of those words is for all the people for whom the desert is home.