Ramsay Wood was born in Texas in 1943 into a diplomat’s family, blending his childhood between Belgium, the Philippines, New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida and (in 1959) Vietnam.

He dropped out of Harvard in 1964 and moved to London to become a freelance photojournalist and also join an amateur group of performance storytellers.

He wrote his first book, Kalila and Dimna — Fables of Friendship and Betrayal , in a fisherman’s cottage in Anstruther, Fife, before returning to London to start Frame Up Ltd and distribute readymade German picture frames in the UK.

Decades later he wrote his second Kalila and Dimna book (Fables of Conflict and Intrigue) in afternoons after working mornings at Emerson House in London.

There he helped dyslexic kids to read, type and spell by using software that spoke aloud colour-coded letters or words from their private screens linked to headsets and self-correcting keyboards. At Emerson House Ramsay also learned that his two favourite ambigrams were dollop and swims.

He is married, shares two cats and lives in Cricklewood, London — not far from Chaucer’s Watling Street.