Alex Michaelides

Alex was born on the small Mediterranean island of Cyprus, to an English mother and a Greek-Cypriot father. He was fortunate enough to grow up in a house full of books. His mother amassed a small library and all the authors who later influenced him as a writer – Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Robert Graves, Henry James – were taken off the shelves and handed to him by his mother with the instruction ‘to read’. (An action she possibly regretted when he became a struggling writer!) But ironically his first and most profound reading experience had nothing to do with his mother. She was perhaps a bit of a literary snob and didn’t read crime fiction – but his older sister did, and Alex snuck into her room when he was about eleven or twelve, and looked at the books on her shelf. He was immediately attracted by her selection of Agatha Christie novels, mainly intrigued by the lurid covers, and chose And Then There Were None to read. He devoured it in a state of excitement and fear and didn’t sleep all night. He was probably scarred for life – and all he wanted was more. The next summer at the beach, he read nothing but Agatha Christie – these were the first adult books he ever read – and that summer, sitting by the sea, reading, wriggling his toes in the sand, are among his happiest memories. Agatha Christie made him into a reader – and a writer. There is something about the structure of a whodunnit - crime, investigation, and final twist - that remains so satisfying to him, so beautiful. As P.D. James said, a mystery brings order from