Featured Interview With Peter G Mackie
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Perth, Scotland in 1957 and spent my early teenage years in the Adolescent Unit of a psychiatric institution. I ran away from home at 16 and suffered abuse on the streets of London. At the age of 20, I started travelling and working in Europe, which helped give me a different perspective on life.
I worked in The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Greece but eventually had to return to the UK due to lack of funds and ended up selling The Big Issue at the corner of George Street and Castle Street in Edinburgh, where I still live.
I am now taking part in various volunteer projects and am considering taking a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I started writing poetry when I was in the hospital in my early teens. It wasn’t really until my mid-teens that I started reading more – everything from The Lord of the Rings to Kerouac, Kafka and later Hermann Hesse. At the age of 17, all the memories of my time in the hospital kept flooding back to me and I just felt that I had to write it all down, resulting in my first novel “The Madhouse of Love”.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have had a number of favourite authors, including Hermann Hesse, Knut Hamsun, Andre Gide and the Glasgow writer Alasdair Gray, who I consider to be possibly the greatest living writer. I would say that my favourite genre to read could be described as “psychological fiction”. As far as non-fiction is concerned, I have had a great interest in both C.G. Jung and R.D. Laing, who both recognised the importance of spiritual experience in modern times.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book “The Last Thing Before the Apocalypse” is a collection of somewhat mysterious writings, partly based on my travels in a young man, with some of the stories also going back to my childhood and teenage years. Some people may find this book disturbing in parts as I have deliberately not shied away from any subject, however contentious, as I wanted to make people aware of things that might not have occurred to them before and I strongly believe that my many unusual experiences have enabled me to do this. Some of the stories are set partly in cold-war Berlin, Greece, Scandinavia, The Netherlands Greece and in Yugoslavia during the ’70s and ’80s.
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