THE PEN IS TAKEN UP
Tony’s writing career began, and his first book was written, at the age of 8!
As Tony says: “My first book was a little tome: The Book of My Pets. This resulted in my first contact with the media as a result of the book winning second prize in my town of Whitstable’s Pet Competition. The Book of My Pets also gave me my first taste of public notoriety, as I made myself none too popular by innocently proclaiming from the pages of the Whitstable Gazette that the world would be a far better place if all the humans were removed, leaving the animals and plants to live their lives undisturbed by us!”
While at school, Tony contributed the occasional article to the school newspaper, and while at the University of British Columbia became a feature columnist for the University newspaper, The Ubyssey. He wrote an investigative and observational column titled Indagatio – ‘the art and science of tracking down’.
When he returned to London in September 1966, his writing career began to blossom. He became a member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), a travel writer for the Daily Telegraph, and the Assistant Editor for Nursery World in the Haymarket Media Group. From 1969-1971 he was privileged to be the Editor of the International Journal for MENSA, the high IQ Society, which, with the approval of the Society, he renamed: Intelligence.
During this prolific period he was asked by Anthony Cheatham, Director of Sphere Publications, and one of the rising young lions in the publishing world, if he could write two books, one on speed reading, and the other on memory. To ‘seal-or-sink’ the deal, Anthony gave Tony a surprise memory test. Tony applied the memory techniques he used at that time in his teaching and was able to memorise everything in the test immediately and perfectly. “Done deal!” said Anthony Cheatham, and within a year Tony’s first two formally published books, Speed Reading and Speed Memory were released in 1971.During that same period, he had been prolifically writing poems, and in the same year his first edition of poetry, Spore One, was published.
Since those early days, Tony has exploded into being a prolific author of world renown. He is the author/co-author of over 120 books on the brain, the body and learning, including the BBC’s classic Use Your Head, as well as four volumes of poetry. Use Your Head was selected, at the turn of the century, by Waterstones bookshops, the Express Newspaper Group, and their advisors as one of the thousand greatest books of the previous millennium. The group recommended it as an essential part of the thousand-book library for the current millennium – the Millennium of the Mind.
As of 2010, Tony’s books have been translated into all the main languages with a current total of 40, and are published and distributedthroughout the globe, in over 200 countries. In total they have sold over 7,000,000 copies. These works are published by over 100 publishers around the world, numbering among them most of the publishing giants. These include: BBC, Pearsons, Harper Collins, Collins Language, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Foreign Language Teaching & Research Press (China), Gower, Hodder & Stoughton, Bertelsmann, Shanghai 99, Jarir, Utusan and Popuri .
