A retired journalist, Joseph Canning has written 12 books and over a million words chronicling the lives of ordinary people working the land in times past, as well as more recent turbulent events.

Joseph was born in north London in February 1940, but was quickly moved to Goldhanger, his mother's home village, to escape the Blitz. There the family lived in a deserted bakehouse in Fish Street, with no electricity, and water collected from the village pump. He went to the village school, and then to Maldon Grammar School.

Joseph's teenage friends in the fifties went straight from school to work on the farms, and his first novel, 'Once Upon an Island' recalls some of this life, featuring a boy growing up on Osea Island (called Norsea in the book).

Sharing the experience of local farmworkers in the fields, pubs and local football and cricket teams gave him the desire to write about ordinary people's lives – not the 'grand folk' that we see so often in costume dramas.

Nine of Joseph's twelve novels are set in towns and villages around Essex, with place names thinly disguised. His concern with ordinary people continues in a trilogy, 'The Other Side of England' and spans the period from 1815 to the 1840s. As Joseph says, "The people in my books ride bicycles or walk, sit in a smoky Vault in the local pub to drink their beer, argue and spit and work five-and-a-half days a week (sometimes six) in the open

fields in rain, hail, sleet and snow – and all for a pittance." The series is inspired by many real-life events in these times, which saw terrible hardships for farmworkers in Southern England.

More recent real-life events inspired 'Never So Innocent Again', a novel based on Joseph's time in Paris as a teenager in 1958, when political turmoil led to murders in the streets and the threat of civil war.

Joseph's thirty-five year career in journalism included spells reporting for newspapers in Wisbech, Buxton, Colchester, Stockport and Sheffield, and even time in Canada working for their national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. Not surprisingly, Joseph lists Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy as his favourite authors. His books are self-published on Amazon (and not to be confused with another writer of the same name who writes about the Middle Ages)

Joseph now lives with his wife in Stockport, but is a regular visitor to his beloved home county, staying with his son in Colchester. He relishes his walks along the seawall by the Blackwater and the recollections of a happy childhood in a special part of the world.