5 Minutes With ... Tom Gilling

As a child my favourite book was ... Animal Lore and Disorder by James Riddell, a picture book whose cardboard pages were split in half, allowing you to create your own animals, such as the torbit (half tortoise, half rabbit) – an early lesson in the transformative power of literature.

Before I was an author I ... sold cameras for an entrepreneur who drove a red Ferrari. I don’t know what happened to the Ferrari but the business ran off the road.  

In three words Grog is ... an intoxicating story.

The most exciting part of researching Grog was ... finding out that however familiar we might think we are with our history, there are always new ways of looking at it. 

In preparation for writing Grog I ... spent a couple of months reading the letters and journals of the First Fleeters – and wondering who taught them to spell!