Paul Cleave
Overview
Christchurch
Christchurch is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the country's second-largest urban area after Auckland. It lies one third of the way down the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula which itself, since 2006, lies within the formal limits of...
, Cleave worked as a pawnbroker for seven years before he turned his full attention to being writer. He had previously written a couple of unpublished manuscripts, penning his first unpublished novel as a 19 year old, and since his earliest days at school he wanted to be a writer.
Although he had wanted to be a writer since he was a child, he did not receive very good feedback about his writing from teachers or his high school report cards, with one stating there was a time and place for his kind of writing, and school was not it.
At nineteen, Cleave was writing novel-length manuscripts that "will never be allowed out of the bottom drawer".