Nicola L.C. Talbot

Genres I write in:
Fiction: crime, thriller, speculative fiction (science fiction, dystopian future, alternative history, supernatural and fantasy).
Children: illustrated fiction for young children (artwork by my friend Magdalene Pritchett).
Non-fiction: LaTeX tutorials.

Favourite Reading Genres: crime, thriller, fantasy, science-fiction

Background:
I was born in the seaside town of Seaford in East Sussex. When I was 18, I moved to Colchester where I studied at the University of Essex, first as an undergraduate in the Mathematics department and then as a postgraduate in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering where I obtained a PhD entitled "An application-oriented comparison of optimisation and neural-based design techniques", which is

Genres I write in:
Fiction: crime, thriller, speculative fiction (science fiction, dystopian future, alternative history, supernatural and fantasy).
Children: illustrated fiction for young children (artwork by my friend Magdalene Pritchett).
Non-fiction: LaTeX tutorials.

Favourite Reading Genres: crime, thriller, fantasy, science-fiction

Background:
I was born in the seaside town of Seaford in East Sussex. When I was 18, I moved to Colchester where I studied at the University of Essex, first as an undergraduate in the Mathematics department and then as a postgraduate in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering where I obtained a PhD entitled "An application-oriented comparison of optimisation and neural-based design techniques", which is a bit of a mouthful but I essentially formulated some functions, applied a bit of calculus, wiggled variables around and wrote computer code to solve the equations.

I moved to Norwich in the mid 1990s and worked on a couple of short-term contracts at the Institute of Food Research at the Norwich Research Park for the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (now Defra). I'm now self-employed and have done various small projects and teaching. I was made an honorary lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and have done some collaborative work with my husband who is a lecturer in the UEA School of Computing Sciences. (Research publications.)

I've always enjoyed reading and writing fiction, and I was awarded a diploma in creative writing at UEA in 2011. I've also always loved beautifully typeset books, especially old books. My PhD introduced me to LaTeX. For those who don't know, TeX was created by Donald Knuth. LaTeX is a format of TeX created by Leslie Lamport. Essentially, as a word processor is the digital successor of a typewriter, so TeX is the digital successor of a typesetter and printing press. LaTeX is a convenient method of accessing the TeX engine in a way that separates content from style.