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About Michael Collins Memoirs

I have written stories for as long as I can remember, and was even suspended from boarding school at eleven years of age for writing them during class. Fortunately, the headmaster saw the constructive side of my sins and allowed me to return. The following year I won a two-shilling writing prize and thought I was the bee’s knees. I had no idea how much I had to learn.

Writing stories became a constant of my early career as an undercover cop in the early 70s. The streets of London’s East End were a mine of inspiration, full of extraordinary characters and dirty deeds. The criminal underworld was no stranger to me.

As a part-time reporter for The Bay of Plenty Times in New Zealand, my writing gained traction, and developed whilst roaming South America as a freelance photo-journalist. Always writing, I also enjoyed a stellar career in hospitality management before turning to writing as full-time occupation over twenty years ago.

Educated in Hong Kong, York (UK) and Singapore, I’ve lived in Australia since 1989. During my travelling years, I’ve rubbed shoulders and dined with Dames and Knights, the rich and famous, and laboured hard for a living alongside hearts-of-gold, rough and tumble, salt-of-the-earth characters.

This wide spectrum of experience has given me the skills to listen, talk with, and understand people from all walks of life, and write their memoirs.

In writing a number of genres including self-help, fiction, biographies, and memoirs, as well as coaching countless people to write, it’s the personal interaction with clients I’ve come to value above all else. With memoirs, I’m trusted with my clients’ inner thoughts and secrets, their regrets, their joys, their fears, their accomplishments, their loves, and their dreams. And so their stories are told.

One of my joys in working with clients is sharing their pleasure as memories come cascading back, people and places from the past are remembered, and events long forgotten come to back to life.

As we talk, my clients often begin to see their memories in a new light; folk may be forgiven, and wounds may be healed. I’m honoured to be a part of this process and I’m always humbled by the experience.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing better than to hear my client, book in hand, proudly say, ‘I wrote this book because …’