He went to boarding school and university in Britain. With his wife Trish he spent a year running a school that they opened in Spain, after which they brought up two smart and bad and handsome good boys in England and Hong Kong. Martin teaches English at Island School in Hong Kong and lives with his macaw on a rooftop in SoHo.

Martin has taught in Hong Kong for the past seventeen years: by far the longest he has lived anywhere. He is English by parentage, passport and education, though England has always been something of a foreign country to him. Spain and Hong Kong are as close as he can get to calling somewhere home.

In 1999 Martin won the South China Morning Post Short Story Competition and has had work published in Dimsum and City-Poetry. He is a member of the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle and of OutLoud, the poetry group.

A number of his poems were included in the OutLoud Anthology (April 2002). Martin maintains a web presence at www.martin.alexander.org/Writing.