Colin Cotterill was born in 1952 London. He studied to become a teacher and embarked on a world tour that never ended. He has worked as a physical education instructor in Israel, an elementary school teacher in Australia, an educational consultant for adults with disabilities in the United States and a university lecturer in Japan. But most of his recent years have been spent in Southeast Asia. Colin has taught and trained teachers in Thailand and on the Burma border. He spent several years in Laos, originally with UNESCO and wrote and published a series of books, Forty English Language Teaching Programs.
Ten years ago Colin became involved in child protection in the region and set up an NGO in Phuket, which he ran for the first two years. After two years of child abuse training and another stint in Phuket, he moved to ECPAT, an international organization to combat child prostitution and pornography. He created his own training program for caregivers. All the while, Colin never abandoned his two passions: cartooning and writing. He provided regular columns for the Bangkok Post, but had little time to write.
It was only after his work with trafficked children that he found himself motivated enough to write his first novel, The Night Bastard (2000). The response to this book was so positive that Colin decided to take a sabbatical and sit down to write novels full-time. Since October 2001, he has written nine more novels. Two of them are based on the theme of child protection: Evil in the Land Without and Pool and Its Role in Asian Communism. Other works have followed.
On June 15, 2009, Colin Cotterill received the Crime Writers Association’s “Dagger in the Library” award for being the “crime fiction author whose work is currently most enjoyed by library users”. When Laotian books gained popularity, Cotterill organized a project to send books to Laotian children and sponsor teacher trainees.
The Books for Laos program has the support of book lovers and is entirely voluntary. Colin has been a regular cartoonist for national publications since 1990. Colin is married. He lives in a fishing village in the Gulf of Thailand with his wife Jessie and an ever-expanding pack of very nervous dogs.