Iain Marshall grew up in Scotland — first in the fishing town of Arbroath on the east coast and then in the Scottish borders. At Stirling University he studied English (specialising in my final year in the prose of Samuel Beckett. That sounds pretty pretentious some twenty years later). After leaving Stirling, he managed two months on the dole in Edinburgh, before answering an advert in the Guardian for a group looking for English speaking graduates to teach in Sudan. He then spent the next four years (1984-1988) in northern Sudanese villages teaching in local secondary schools. It remains the pinnacle of his working life to date. To explain how much it meant to him would require a book-length essay (and he is indeed currently trying to write one, albeit at a snail's pace). After Sudan, he got work with Save the Children Fund in a project for Vietnamese refugees in London. That lasted for five years and is also notable for being the place where he met his wife, Jackie. Since his career seemed to lack any logical path, he next worked at BBC World Service Arabic TV news, which was an ill-fated but exciting venture. Ultimately it was closed down due to irreconcilable editorial differences between the Beeb and its (Saudi) commercial partners. Incidentally, the nascent al-Jazeera channel at the time benefited hugely from the demise of BBC Arabic TV. A stint of freelancing as a TV and radio news hack ensued and he is now on the staff of an established daily BBC news TV programme. The one thing he has neglected is his writing. Still fired up with the idealism of youth in Sudan, he wrote a lot of mediocre poetry and prose. But now back in London, life seems so hectic that writing is always at the foot of his to-do list. There will be time to change all that, hopefully.