Brian Jacques was born in Liverpool, England on June 15th, 1939. Along with forty percent of the population of Liverpool, his ancestral roots are in Ireland, County Cork to be exact. He grew up in the area around the Liverpool docks. His interest in adventure stories began at an early age with reading the books of Daniel Defo and Arthue Conan Doyle. He attended St. John's School, an inner city school that had its playground on the roof. After Brian finished school at fifteen, he set out to find adventure as a merchant seaman. He travelled to many far away ports, including New York, Valparaiso, San Francisco, and Yokohama. Tiring of the lonely life of a sailor, he returned to Liverpool where… he worked as a railway fireman, a longshoreman, a long-distance truck driver, a bus driver, a boxer, a bobby or Police Constable, a postmaster, and a stand-up comic. During the sixties, he and his two brothers, formed a folksinging group known as The Liverpool Fishermen. Mr. Jacques has written both poetry and music, but he began his writing career in earnest as a playwright. His three stage plays Brown Bitter, Wet Nellies, and Scouse have been performed at the Everyman Theatre. Mr. Jacques wrote Redwall for the children at the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind in Liverpool, where as a truck driver, he delivered milk. His style of writing is very descriptive, because of the nature of his first audience, for whom he painted pictures with words, so that they could see them in their imaginations. His writing gained acclaim when Alan Durband, his childhood English teacher, read Redwall, and showed it to a publisher without telling Brian. This event led to a contract for the first five books in the Redwall series. He now hosts his own weekly radio show, Jakestown, on BBC Radio Merseyside. It airs Sunday afternoons on 95.8 FM in Liverpool, where Brian shares his comedy and wit, and plays his favourites from the world of opera.