Born in 1955, Jon became a secondary teacher of Drama and English, and tried to become a full-time artist in fields as diverse as cartooning, theatre and creative writing. While the artist’s learning curve continued its infinitesimally slow parabolic progress away from ignorance, there were unpublished cartoon strips, lots of community theatre, a long-running TV ad featuring him scratching his bum, several well-received one-act plays written for senior secondary students and a novella, Duty of Care, a cautionary tale about teaching in high schools. But no money to speak of. In 2009, he found happiness via the internet: Lilit, the love of his life. He travelled to Armenia to meet her, proposed after four days and they have been happily married since early 2010. In 2014, inspired by Lilit, he drafted Journey of Faith, an extended one-act play to commemorate the 2015 Centenary of the Armenian Genocide, which was staged in Adelaide during the week leading up to April 24 and in Sydney, three weeks later. Encouraged further by Lilit, Jon began adapting the work into a novel and the result is Angel of Aleppo, a Story of the Armenian Genocide, Jon’s first full-length novel. Jon loves books, theatre, movies, the Adelaide Crows, Australian cricket, good food and wine and lives in the Adelaide Hills with Lilit.