Oliver, who is generally known as Olli, is the founder of Blue Poppy Publishing. He hated writing at school, and often spent all lunchtime finishing work he had failed to do in class. Despite that, he began his writing career many years later by creating a website about his Grandfather, Frank Kingdon-Ward; a famous plant collector.
That website led to Oliver’s first paid writing work, a 1,200 word article about Frank, for “The Great Explorers” Robin Hanbury-Tenyson, (Thames and Hudson) US Amazon link
With a family of four children, the next writing project was inspired by some little model dragons in a souvenir shop. The story it prompted would have been very cheesy and full of tropes, but fortunately, it turned into “Children of the Wise Oak” which was finally published in 2016. The second book in the series, “Women of the Wise Oak” came out in 2017 while “Men of the Wise Oak” which completes the first trilogy came out in 2019 as an ebook, followed by a print-on-demand paperback and then in 2020 a limited edition hardcover was produced.
While “Children of the Wise Oak” was slowly taking shape, Olli began writing a story for his youngest son who was not enjoying history lessons, where he was learning about Romans. It was about a boy who found a time tunnel that took him back to Roman Londinium, and had some adventures, including learning a bit of Latin. That book came out as “Time Tunnel to Londinium” in 20010 and is now part of a five book series. (Book 5 is currently – as of spring 2020 – still only available as an ebook).
In 2017 Olli was asked to write a book to coincide with the Big Summer Reading Cahllenge, not as an official part of it, but to be given to local children as a reward to getting involved. This resulted in “For Cats’ Eyes Only” which became the first in an ongoing series of stories featuring a feline secret agent, Felix Whiter, as well as a host of animmal characters who keep law and order in Wilder Wood and beyond.
Olli continues to work on those series, and has also written a fun and frivolous novella about a minor rock star who is trasported to a fantasy medieval world and has published an annotated and revised memoir written by his great great grandmother over a hundred years ago. He is also working (which is a too generous description of actual progress made) on a definitive biography of his grandfather Frank Kingdon-Ward, as well as attempting to help many other authors to publish their books.