Lighter than air

Clive Chatfield has two daughters, half-a-dozen grandchildren and shares his home in suburban Melbourne with a cat. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Melbourne University and spent his working life as a tramways engineer. He learned to fly at the age of 56 and has seen much of Australia from the air – and not from 30,000 feet.

An inveterate reader of murder, mystery and western novels, he decided soon after retiring to write some of his own. The first draft of Lighter Than Air began in 1988 while he attended a writing course at Holmesglen TAFE. Spurred on by his (late) wife Joyce and a good result against some 300 entries when he entered a re-written Lighter Than Air in a competition in 1995, he has continued writing novels, mostly as an escape from reality, using the setting and characters from the first as a background to others. Friends and relatives have read his novels; their response has finally led him to release the first to the public.