"With a full-time job in academic and educational publishing, I have spent the last six years snatching time, whether scribbling away in the early hours, grubbing around in libraries or attending courses to try and hone my writing. The final result is The King's Jockey.

"So why do this? It's a question I often ask myself, but the truth is that, like many people, although I had heard of the sacrifice made by the suffragette who ran out in front of the King's horse during the Derby of 1913, I knew next to nothing about the jockey. Who was he and how did this terrible event affect him?

"There was little written about Bertie Jones, so I had to research most of my material. The more I found out, the more it made me wonder about where he had come from, how he had achieved his fame and how he coped after the suffragette incident. My story is fictional, but I have tried to create what might have been a similar world. I wanted to examine what might have driven Emily Wilding Davison to her dreadful fate and to lift Bertie up from a mere footnote in history."