I'm pleased to announce that ‘Bingley Austen’ has agreed to become a guest author on this blog. Here is his introduction:
I first became interested in the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome as a child in England through re-tellings of myths. When I started grammar school just before my 12th birthday Latin was still a compulsory subject. I enjoyed the lessons and found I was good at it, so it seemed natural a year later, when we were offered the choice of Greek, German or Russian as our 3rd language to choose Greek. When the time came to start 'A' level study (at age 16), I chose Greek, Latin and Ancient History.
For the most part, I abandoned Classics at university but did manage to squeeze in courses on Ancient Greek religion and Greek and Roman drama.
Despite not continuing with formal study of Classics I still maintained a keen interest in anything to do with Greece and Rome. After a series of office jobs, I became an EFL teacher. That took me to SE Asia, where I now live and work as an editor and translator.
Apart from reading the occasional novel set in Greece or Rome, I didn't have much chance to follow my interests in classical civilisation out here until I got Internet access in the mid 1990s, and at about the same time Jakarta got some big English-language bookshops. One of the first forums I joined encouraged us to take pseudonyms in the form of character + author, hence Bingley Austen (I couldn't really see myself as Darcy).
Welcome, Bingley!
