About the Author

Robert Gollagher was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1967. At the age of 21 he graduated with honours from Murdoch University and began his first career as a veterinary surgeon. After spending two years in small animal practice in Melbourne, in 1991 he moved to Saskatoon, Canada and entered a PhD programme in immunology, studying immunotherapy of bone cancer. During this time he travelled to Europe and South America. In 1993 he discontined his studies in favour of entering private industry, returned to Perth, and later began a successful technical sales career as a Hospital Specialist Representative for a major pharmaceutical company.

However in 1995, at the age of 27, he decided if he were ever going to pursue his love of writing, now was the time. Accordingly he made the difficult decision to quit his job, return to working as a veterinary surgeon part-time, and begin work on his first novel, The Colour of Sunday Afternoons. Over the next five years he completed the novel and two more: Green Dream, which drew on his experiences as a vet and his knowledge of clinical depression; and The Street Angel, which drew on his experiences travelling in Brazil in the early nineties.

Having achieved his goal of writing three novels, Robert returned to pursuing a conventional career. His lifelong interest in software technology led to becoming a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform in August 2000. In 2001 he moved to Sydney, working as a Java Development Support Engineer for two years, supporting some of the world's busiest e-commerce websites. In 2003 he settled in Brisbane and currently very much enjoys working as a software engineer for a leading Australian software development company.

He plans to continue writing in his spare time and hopes to begin work on a fourth novel soon.

Photo: The author at Mylestom, New South Wales, in April 2003