For several years, I wrote non-fiction articles I published in Canadian and American magazines and on radio but my heart was really in storytelling. Hi, I’m Pam Crompton. I grew up on the outskirts of a small village in Welsh farming country. When I was a little girl there was no television, and radio was limited to the news and music. For entertainment, people used to gather around the fire and tell stories or talk about something that happened just as they had from time immemorial. If I stayed very quiet, my mother would forget I wasn’t in bed and I could listen to the adults talk. Many of those stories stayed in my mind and eventually I included some of them in my collection Land of My Fathers. Not all of the talk involved people we knew, a lot of it was folklore and history. I doubt there are many Welsh people who are not curious about and proud of their Celtic ancestry and who are not intrigued by Merlin. At school, history was my best subject; I found it fascinating. When I left school, we moved to Carmarthen, a Welsh town named after Merlin, and I was surrounded by history which I continued to study. I used some of this knowledge for my novel The Last Druid. Although my most recent novel The Agency is set in Calgary, upcoming novels are set in Wales or England because those countries offer themselves as better settings to the stories I write than the wide open spaces of Canada.