Michael MolyneuxMichael Molyneux was born in Preston, England, in 1982. As a young man, in a small woodfire cottage on the west coast of Ireland, his uncle gave him copies of Jack Kerouac's Selected Letters, Carlos Castaneda's Teachings of Don Juan, and John Muir's y First Summer In The Sierra, and -widened out the boundaries of [his] being.- A series of hiking trips around Europe cemented the belief that, as Muir had observed, -going out . . . was really going in.- He developed an interest in poetry and meditation and studied philosophy at university. He had a series of short-term jobs: careworker for Alzheimer's patients, postman, note-taker for deaf undergraduates, reader for a blind law lecturer, book seller, pizza maker, gardener, and painter. He hitchhiked to London to take an English-teaching course, after which he moved to Galicia in northern Spain to work in a language school. He saved up enough money to spend a year traveling around Latin America, the trip on which Letters from a Young Poet is based, before moving to Borneo to work on a teaching development project while completing the book. He now lives in Santa Marta on Colombia's northern coast, between the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Caribbean sea. Read More Read Less