Meet the author

Philip Wilkinson was born and raised in Headingley, Leeds, during the rapidly changing social landscape of the 1970s. The eldest of five children in a household shaped by financial hardship and evangelical faith, his early life was a patchwork of coal fires, shared rooms, and resourcefulness. His family’s modest terraced house was often shared with student lodgers to make ends meet, and entertainment came not from screens but from stories—real, imagined, whispered, and lived.

Though the family lacked many modern luxuries—no car, no television—there was no shortage of creativity. Sunday school meetings, hymn-singing, and visits to revivalist events like the Billy Graham rallies on Woodhouse Moor formed a strong foundation of language, rhythm, and reflective storytelling. These early influences, combined with the austerity of working-class life, instilled in him a deep appreciation for atmosphere, memory, and the power of narrative to transform the ordinary.

Philip’s professional journey has been as varied as his interests. Over the decades, he has worked in pyrotechnics, business, and creative arts, eventually becoming a professional firework display designer and co-founder of a family business. Alongside this, his lifelong love of photography evolved from hobby to professional skill—culminating in his artistic use of AI image generation, where he now crafts precise and cinematic visuals for his books through prompt-based design.

He is the creator of the successful Whispers folklore series—regional anthologies exploring the ghosts, myths, and monsters of the British Isles. Each volume combines meticulous research with imaginative storytelling, reviving legends from Yorkshire, the Scottish Highlands, Cornwall, Ireland, and beyond. Blending folklore with fiction, these books speak to Philip’s lifelong fascination with the hidden, the half-remembered, and the liminal spaces between reality and belief.

Philip is also a passionate traveller, having explored much of mainland Europe, the Nordic Arctic, and remote highland and island regions. His travel memoirs, A Grand Tour, Seven Go Travelling and A Road Less Travelled, recount family expeditions through snow-laden forests, medieval cities, and Nordic coasts. Richly illustrated with his own photography, these works offer humorous, reflective, and sometimes deeply personal accounts of shared experience and discovery.

In recent years, Philip has turned toward speculative fiction—drawing on his love of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama and Odyssey series, the philosophical complexity of Stanislaw Lem and Carl Sagan, and the haunting clarity of Ted Chiang. Echoes Through Time marked his debut in science fiction: a cerebral and cinematic exploration of memory, time, artificial intelligence, and the unintended consequences of progress. Its sequels, The Harmonic Sphere and Origin Singularity, continue the arc—culminating in a trilogy that explores the origins of sentience, the shape of time, and the destiny of intelligence itself.

Every image in these novels was created under Philip’s personal direction, using a locked character design system for consistency and visual clarity. His skills in photography, composition, and symbolic representation are evident in every chapter title and key scene.

When he is not writing, Philip continues to develop new volumes in the Whispersseries, explore innovative uses of AI in narrative design, and travel with his camera in hand—always searching for the next story, whether in myth, memory, or the distant future.