Tony Dwyer

Find Tony Dwyer on
table number 21
at the summer
Oxford Indie Book Fair
on 13-July 2025

See home page for details, map and more.

I’ve written stories, mostly for my own entertainment, since I was a child. Now, still writing, I dream up stories of the kind that the “child me” would have enjoyed – and, in fact, still does.

They’re fantasy tales, traditional in style but set in the modern world, about everyday children, with everyday lives and everyday troubles, who unexpectedly encounter other worlds – far closer to this one than they, and perhaps you, could have imagined – and quickly find themselves out of their depth in situations they need to find their way out of, or through; and, by doing so, they come to a broader understanding of their own world, and perhaps pick up a clue or two as to how to go about living in it.

I’ve never believed that the fact that a book is about children means that it’s necessarily just for children. A lot of copies of my books are bought for children by parents and grandparents, yes – but it often happens that adults pick them up, say “Oh, this is right up my street; I love all that” and buy them to read themselves; and I recently heard from one mother who, having bought one of my books to read to her daughter at bedtime, ended up getting drawn into the story herself and reading it through to the end one night after putting her daughter to bed.

As a child, as well as Mary Norton’s tale of witchcraft-in-small-town-England “Bedknobs and Broomsticks”, I owned the novelisation of the Disney film loosely based on it, the back cover blurb of which ended: “An enchanting story to delight all those who believe in magic, or wish they still did.” Well, along those lines, I’m writing stories for those who haven’t forgotten they believe in magic, or for those who might, perhaps, need a little nudge to help them remember.

Both my books – “The Day the Strangers Came” and “The Winter Garden and Other Stories” – are available on Amazon, and the easiest way to find them is via the links given on my website: www.tonydwyerauthor.co.uk. Otherwise you can come and say hello at the Fair on July the thirteenth.