Mike was born and brought up in Swansea, Wales. Best known as a playwright, he is the author of over a dozen plays for stage, radio and television including work for Paines Plough, Avon Touring, and BBC Radio 4. The Salt Lake Acting Company and the Utah Contemporary Theatre have performed his work, and with the latter he devised the Talking Wales series of monologues which was performed in unusual theatre spaces including an art gallery in a doctor’s surgery.
Mike has first and second degrees from the Universities of London and Bristol, and he has an M.A. in British and American Literature from the University of Utah. He has taught there and at Westminster College. He has served as a Dramaturg for the Salt Lake Acting Company, and has helped develop new plays by Julie Jensen, Jeff Metcalf, J.T. Rogers, and others. More recently he completed The Path is Green, a seed commission for National Theatre Wales.
Mike learned his trade as a novelist by working as a freelance publisher’s reader, editor and rewrite man. With his former writing partner, Rick Trader Witcombe, he wrote novels under a variety of pseudonyms including Rafe Quilty and Jericho Hood. When the BBC contacted him some years ago and asked him if he really was the Mike Dorrell who had novelized the Dick Barton Radio Series, the answer was yes. Cover blown, he decided to return to novel writing, focussing on the mystery genre.
When he is not writing, Mike likes to restore bicycles. He is especially fond of recumbents which he has been riding for nearly twenty years. As both Wales and Salt Lake City are mountainous he is always tinkering, trying to find a gear that is low enough to get up the next climb sitting down.
