As a teenager, Alan Johnson (b. 1950) nurtured a desire to become a writer. Born into poverty, he put that off for work that enabled him to support himself and his family. He ended up becoming an MP and served in the UK parliament from 1997 to 2017.

After the success of his first memoir, This Boy, Johnson went on to write a 2nd volume, Please, Mister Postman (2014) about his time as both a postman and a union official.

In 2016 he published The Lond and Winding Road which talked about his time as a politician.

This was followed in 2018 by In My Life: A Music Memoir, in which Johnson talks about his lifelong enthusiasm for music.

And last year, Johnson published his first work of fiction, The Late Train to Gipsy Hill, a thriller.

It took a while for Alan Johnson to achieve that childhood dream, but he made it!