Owen Croft was forged in the relentless drizzle of Manchester's backstreets, where the Irwell murmurs secrets to the stone warehouses and the city's heartbeat thumps like a faulty piston. Born and raised amid the red-brick sprawl of the North, this unassuming bloke traded the roar of Friday night lock-ins for the hush of forgotten moors, where he could finally hear his own thoughts without the din of the world crashing in.

By day, Owen's a ghost in the machine?tinkering with words in a creaky attic studio overlooking the Pennines, far from the pixelated frenzy of social scrolls and siren calls. He's the sort who brews a pot of builder's tea strong enough to strip paint, cracks open a dog-eared Philip K. Dick or Raymond Chandler, and lets the pages pull him into alternate realities where Manchester's canals twist into wormholes or its cobbled alleys hide syndicate shadows. Writing, for him, is less a craft than a quiet rebellion: a way to wrestle the chaos of cyber-noir heists, gene-spliced grudges, and temporal double-crosses onto the page, all laced with that wry, rain-soaked Northern grit.

When he's not chasing plot twists through the ether, you'll find Owen hiking the wild fringes of the Peak District, notebook in hand, scribbling fragments inspired by the wind-whipped heather or a sudden squall. For Owen Croft, the best stories aren't told; they're unearthed, one sodden boot-print at a time. Escape with him. The world's mad enough as it is.