Paul Hunt was born in the early sixties at Thrupp Turn Cottage at the edge of the Treacle Mines that nestle near the banks of the River Thames Radcot, Faringdon, Oxfordshire. The middle child of four other siblings, Paul attended Shellingford and Shrivenham Primary Schools and Faringdon Comprehensive School. Married with two children they moved to Tiverton in Devon, where they have lived for the past twenty years. Paul is a Governor at Two Moors Primary School in the Town and for many years associated with the Local Youth Football Team Moors. He is also
a director of the Tiverton Learning Cooperative. Paul works for a much loved Devon Charity.
Paul began writing in his early teens to express is emotions and feelings primarily through lyrics and poems. at the age of sixteen inspired by a photograph he wrote the original blueprint for the novel For Hannah They Prayed. He spent the next five years researching the book before attempting to write it. Over the following twenty years there were several attempts to write the book, but as Paul would say.
"Life got in the way. I was busy working, raising children, other projects, and challenges, yet the story always remained inside my head, often spilling out into short stories. It is like a film that lives in your head and is never too far from your thoughts. New scenes and characters would emerge battling out their stories, often confusing, always conflicting, pushing me for answers for print time, never really leaving me, as if demanding me to put pen to paper."
In 2019 Paul began to seriously plan the book and after an inspirational tour of Rome and Florence in Italy he was further inspired to put pen to paper and serious work finally began on the novel. In March 2020 on the announcement of the Covid 19 lockdown Paul took his opportunity and spent everyday writing.
"Most of them were eight to ten hour days, sat at a desk, re-planning, re-plotting and building the ideas. The text just flowed like a waterfall day after day." At the end of the lockdown I had my first draft. "It was far from the final text, but I had it on paper. My daughter, whom I had asked to critique the text was able to destroy it chapter by chapter. In truth, much of what she said I already knew but none the less she was blunt and to the point and added some of her own points. This left me with a great place to start and a clear vision and plan to where I needed to go. During the second lockdown I worked at the local charity and then in the third lockdown I had the opportunity to re-write the first draft, motivated and inspired this became the basis of the trilogy that is now For Hannah they Prayed and by the end of that lock down I had two of the three manuscripts under my belt and was well into the third. At this time, I mentioned my writings to a fellow governor who then offered to edit the books as my daughter had returned to Oxford."
