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About the Author

Christine Coleman spent her childhood in the Sussex country side, and her late teens and early twenties in Dublin, where she learned to enjoy Guinness and climb mountains while gaining a degree in English. She now lives in Sutton Coldfield and works as manager of an Adult Education Centre in Birmingham, devoting most of her spare time to writing fiction and poetry.

Together with a group of three other poets under the name of Late Shift, she has given performances at poetry festivals and arts centres around the country, including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003. Her own poetry collection, Single Travellers, was published by Flarestack in 2004.

The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society is the first of her novels to be published. The initial germ of the idea for this took hold while she was dangling from a paraglider 3,000 feet above a lagoon on an island in the Indian Ocean. She believes that the saying, Life begins at forty, doesnt go far enough, and feels that as we get older we can gain inspiration from seeing people in their seventies or eighties rise to the challenge of new ventures.

From the Author

I love reading. I love the way a well written book can tell me things I didn't realise I knew already. What has amazed me is that writing a novel can have the same effect. I wanted to produce a story that might help to shift the negative attitude towards old age that's so prevalent in many western cultures, but I wasn't too sure at the start what exactly it was that I was trying to convey, let alone how I would go about doing so.

It was the characters in this novel who helped to clarify my thoughts. Their ages range from three to seventy-five, and they weren't in the least bit interested in ideas, as such. They were just muddling through the usual complexities of ordinary life that arise from divorce. I felt that an older central character embarking on a quest to find her grandchildren could strike a chord with many readers, but once Agnes Borrowdale had climbed out of the window of the Harmony Home for the Young at Heart, I had only a hazy notion of what she would be doing next and who she would meet along the way, apart from Felix, for whom she invents The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society. This concept came to me originally when I was approaching my fiftieth birthday and resolved to take up more challenges as I grew older, rather than sink into a slow decline with my increasing years.

Since then, I've forced myself into a reasonable state of fitness by regular trips to the local gym, and have dallied with abseiling and paragliding. The mental challenge of weaving my range of quite serious themes into an entertaining story seems to have given me a bit more of an inkling, perhaps, into what makes this amazing, scary, crazy world go round. And if you have even half as much fun with the ideas and characters in this novel as I've had in writing about them it will be a great read!

Public performances

Christine's wide experience of reading her own poems to audiences around the country has honed her skills of expressive reading. Since the publication of The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society in October 05, she has visited several book-reading and literature-appreciation groups in the Midlands to discuss her novel, answer questions and read extracts.

These events include: Nottingham Readers Day Workshop Event; Birmingham Libraries' Reading Groups, Birmingham Adult Education 'Enjoying Literature' groups, Sutton Coldfield Ottakars reading Group. Events in the South East are also being planned.