How did you become a writer? I kind of fell into it, probably always was connected to it. My father was a professor of English lit, and my mother the best-read person I’ve ever met. I was writing poetry when I was ten, more or less things that came to me in the night. My poetry was first published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, a good ten years before I started my first novel.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Two English teachers in high school in Portland, Maine. In junior and senior year of high school we had to write short stories from time to time, then my senior English teacher got me to enter a story in a nationwide contest, and it won second place. But at the time I was far more interested in girls, sports and mountain climbing, so didn’t write another story for years. I never have tried to write like anyone else; however my earliest favorite writers were Hemingway, Jack London, Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain, all the Russians especially Tolstoy and Gogol, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, Washington Irving, Longfellow and Poe. After I started reading French my favorites expanded to include Camus, Malraux, Romain Gary, Hugo and Balzac. Another major influence on my writing was having learned Latin, which can help to give one’s words a concise power (the number of words is always the inverse of the impact sought).

When and where do you write? Wherever I am. Having spent years as a war journalist in nasty places, I can write anywhere – in the bush, in jail, in the mountains, an airplane, etc. I do like to have a study to work in, however, when I’m at home.

What are you working on now? Since war broke out in Ukraine, I have had a very difficult time writing. Having spent a lot of time in Russia, and having been involved as a diplomat in the negotiations after the end of the cold war, I expect we’ll be in a nuclear war before the end of 2023. This makes it hard to focus on anything other than trying to stop the war.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Never, other than the aforementioned war issues.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? From Carlos Castañeda: Follow the path with heart.

What’s your advice to new writers? Living is far more important than writing. It’s better to live a full life of work, love, play and rest, to do many things, go many places. If then you write, it will be based on wider experience in the real world. I tend to write about places and things I know, which gives the writing more accuracy. When I describe a street corner or mountain or some faraway action, it’s usually because I’ve been there. And when you place the reader in an actual situation, the emotional impact of the writing is enhanced. And it is by emotion, not by words, that we learn how to navigate the joys, sorrows and mysteries of life. For more than a million years, our ancestors were telling stories around the campfire, tales of where to hunt and where the dangers were – sharing knowledge to benefit all. The goal of writing remains the same: Enrich everyone’s understanding of life, including one’s own.

Author of a dozen best-selling novels, ecologist, war and human rights journalist, award-winning poet and international energy expert, Mike Bond has lived and worked in over thirty countries on seven continents. He has been called “the master of the existential thriller” (BBC), “one of America’s best thriller writers” (Culture Buzz), “a nature writer of the caliber of Matthiessen” (WordDreams), and “one of the 21st Century’s most exciting authors” (Washington Times). He has covered wars, revolutions, terrorism, military dictatorships and death squads in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and Africa, and environmental issues including elephant poaching, habitat loss, wilderness survival, whales, wolves and many other endangered species. His novels place the reader in intense experiences in the world’s most perilous places, in dangerous liaisons, political and corporate conspiracies, wars, and revolutions, making “readers sweat with [their] relentless pace” (Kirkus), “in that fatalistic margin where life and death are one and the existential reality leaves one caring only to survive” (Sunday Oregonian). He has climbed mountains on every continent and trekked more than 50,000 miles in the Himalayas, Mongolia, Russia, Europe, New Zealand, North and South America, and Africa.