Colin Cotterill
Colin Cotterill (born 2 October 1952) is a London-born teacher, author, comic book writer and cartoonist. Cotterill has dual English and Australian citizenship. He lives in Thailand, where he writes the award-winning Dr Siri Paiboun mystery series set in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and the Jimm Juree crime novels set in southern Thailand. Biography. Colin Cotterill was born in London and trained as a teacher. He worked as a physical education instructor in Israel, a primary school teacher in Australia, a counsellor for educationally handicapped adults in the U.S. and a university lecturer in  Japan. More recently he taught and trained teachers in Thailand, and on the Burmese border. He spent several years in Laos, initially with UNESCO, and wrote and produced a forty-programme language teaching series; "English By Accident", for Thai national television. Cotterill became involved in child protection in the region and set up an NGO in Phuket, which he ran for the first two years. After two more years of study of child abuse issues, and one more stint in Phuket, he moved on to ECPAT, an international organisation combating child prostitution and pornography. He established their training programme for  caregivers. During this time Cotterill contributed regular columns to the "Bangkok Post". Cotterill's first novel, "The Night Bastard", was published by Suk's Editions in 2000. The positive reaction to this novel prompted Cotterill to write full-time. His subsequent books include "Evil in the Land Without" (Asia Books 2003), "Pool and Its Role in Asian Communism" (Asia Books 2005), "The Coroner's Lunch" (Soho Press 2004), "Thirty Three Teeth" (2005), "Disco for the Departed" (2006), "Anarchy and Old Dogs" (2007), "Curse of the Pogo Stick" (2008), "The Merry Misogynist" (2009), "Love Songs from a Shallow Grave" (2010), and  Slash and Burn (2011). On 15 June 2009 Colin Cotterill received the Crime Writers' Association "Dagger in the Library" award for being "the author of crime fiction whose work is currently giving the greatest enjoyment to library users". Cotterill set up the Books for Laos project to send books to Lao children and sponsor trainee teachers. Books for Laos receives support from fans of the books and is administered purely on a voluntary basis. He has also been involverd in Big Brother Mouse, a not-for-profit publishing project in Laos founded by Sasha Alyson. Since 1990 Cotterill has been  a regular cartoonist for national publications. A Thai-language translation of his cartoon scrapbook "Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket" was published by Matichon in 2004. On 4 April 2004 he launched an illustrated bilingual column, "Cycle Logical", in the news magazine "Matichon Weekly". Some of these columns have since been collected in a book.