Bio:Michael Gilwood

Michael Gilwood (Writer)

At the age of nine, Michaels writing career began with children's columns in the local newspaper in the quaint little English village called Otham. At the age of ten he moved to Johannesburg with his family and began concocting scary short stories to read aloud in class. Admiring the power of literature, Michael began writing poems. His first novel Earth Dawn came to light a few years later. His third novel DOK or Detached Occidental Kingdom has just been published; it's a futuristic outlook of the human race and where its headed. His influences have always been the late Arthur Clark and Philip K Dick amongst many others. He has a deep motivation and love for music and uses its inspiration and drive in his literary success. Michael is a creative master and is at present completing another novel due to be published in April 2010 called master of the light. His freshness and superb imagination lets him roam free leaving many other authors behind. Here is an excerpt from DOK as the protagonist, Stephen Gotlar sees it for the first time: At the bridge exit, a suspended red light reminding me of an old sixties Volksie indicator tilted upwards in front of us. “Stop” said Bernard reaching into his jacket pocket. As I pulled up alongside illuminated contemporary plastic shaped in old, a gaudy horizontal bar lowered itself in front of the car, and a synthesized voice emerged from a speaker inside the wooden post flanking the driver’s window. Affixed to the top, a living camera swung itself in my direction. Invisibly manipulated, hushed stepper motors activated the iris and focal mechanisms inside the lens… From the security exit of Brook Bridge, the remaining distance of four kilometres was barren flatland. I could see what Bernard had meant when he said that DOK had been built on this site for its good, all-round clear view. Drawing up closer, the spotlight that had previously swung in our direction, continued guiding us towards what he’d described earlier as Gate-A. Distant, scurrying forms carried things; some walked back and forth from one unknown point to another. Bernard broke my concentration… DOK is principally broken into two halves. January 2024 (somewhere around the middle of the novel) is when the real trouble starts; Michael would like to share it with readers and fiction lovers alike… The wind rustled and whistled discordantly through a blackness filled with make-believe shadows. The main lights were switched off, as even the workers tonight didn’t work. It was New Years Eve, and only a couple of emergency beacons were sporadically switched on provoking eerie imaginative patterns. The workers were in their homes hoping and praying to their god’s that some good would eventually come of all this. As they moved on, fog materialized from around a corner of an unfinished building and menacingly curled its way in the cold air forming monsters and evil transformations. Gossard taking note of this phantasmal iniquity buttoned up his jacket. The absence of the moon amplified the deficiency of artificial light as the emergency lights spaced twenty metres apart provided little or no help. Eventually in all the gloom, Quaid and Gossard reached the vicinity of the holding den. A furious, heavy bashing ruptured the nightly silence. From the forces of nature to the progress and greed of by man, DOK is complete in every detail. Michael would like to take this opportunity in saying that if we are human with a human value that has evolutionised along with us, take the time to read DOK, you will really enjoy it.