A prize-winning author, Garry McDougall, brings a fresh new collection of stories from France and Spain. He casts his eye over its colourful towns, draws inspiration from each town's weird, violent and peculiar histories, including real and reimagined évents. These towns shape their people. His style is colourful, intense and full of vivid images, 'I am pilgrim to Nogaro, north of Pau, south of Brive, east of the Atlantic, west of Shanghai beer. Watching TV Rugby in southern France, it's Pau v Brive; thirty men wrestling in the mud, rucking, mucking and mauling merrily, the thirty-first man blowing his whistle. No reason.'
Trouble! From a sports-crazed childhood, and his first scribblings incinerated by a irate headmaster. High school success meant they couldn't refuse his university entry, where he soon led the Anti-War movement, initiated sit-ins and subsequent arrests. By burning his 'draft-card' and opposing military conscription, he soon landed in gaol.
Finding travel more fun, on his overland trip from Singapore to Amsterdam, he met Yasser Arafat, lived with gypsies, trekked Nepal, took a life-changing trip in Pakistan, and fell in love with France.
After two years pretending to be a Maths teacher, he studied the Art and co-created the Official Bicentennial Great North Walk, a long-distance walking track to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. They refused him an Honour and threw him off the Board when he objected to a cigarette company sponsorship.
After publication of Great North Walk and NSW Heritage Walks, he started a successful business, Great Australian Walks. This fifteen-year stint involved numerous media events, interviews, and TV Travel shows. Exhausted by 2000, he returned to art, and began writing poetry, short stories and novels.
After a stint of Adult Ed, Artist-in-Residence and lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, he completed his first novel, 'Belonging'. A second novel, 'Starts With C,' was followed up with a third, 'Knowing Simone', and a fourth, 'Blacksmith and Canon'. The fifth,' A Blacksmith’s Life' has been followed by 'Sea Voices', with a seventh, 'Renaissance', in the making.
Two inspired travel books Damn! and Border and Soul, plus ten other books on the Spanish, French and Portuguese Caminos de Santiago, make him the pilgrimage path’s most prolific author.
Garry co-initiated the Official Bicentennial Great North Walk, was President of Balmain Institute for seven years, and on the executive of the South Coast Writers Centre. A member of DiVerse (ekphrasis poets) and the Write-On novelist's group, he won the Peter Cowan Short Story Prize with Patting the Dog, exhibits paintings and photographs, was Feature Poet at the Sydney Writers Festival, and won the Art-In-Unusual-Place Grant in 2022.
Practising “Anarchic Rhyme” is all art forms, he masquerades as Hugo Hugo, a 510 yr. old who bemoans his birth as too late for the best of the Renaissance, though passionate for every age of human folly.