Tim Thornton was born in Darlington in 1973. Despite a boarding-school education and a degree in Drama, his adulthood has largely been spent playing the drums, currently for alt-blues act Fink.
In 2006 he escaped from behind the drumkit and headed for his laptop where he attempted to do what few drummers had done before: string a written sentence together. In fact he managed around 15,000 of them, forming the backbone of his first novel, The Alternative Hero, published by Jonathan Cape in 2009.
In 2010 Tim's years of being in bands (9 unsigned, 2 signed) climaxed in a second novel, Death of an Unsigned Band, which contains a further 12,000 sentences, some of which contain verbs.