Phil W. Bayles

Serious ideas from a silly man.

About the author

Hello there! Thanks for visiting my website.

Doubtless you’ve already read the brief bio I put on my homepage, but I wanted to write something a little more in-depth here. Plus, if you scroll further down the page you’ll see a nice list of all my accomplishments: competitions I do well in, places I get published, that sort of thing.

(It’ll get longer, I promise.)

A brief history of me

I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been able to hold a pen. My early work was, to put it charitably, derivative. I drew knock-off Captain Underpants comics; I wrote fan-fiction before I knew what fan-fiction was; I penned a sequel to The Rugrats Movie that was basically a beat-for-beat replay of the first movie.

At university, I fell in with the student journalism crowd, mostly as a way to watch movies for free, and decided to try and turn that into a career as an actual journalist. I got my MA, found a job in Paris, fell in love with the woman who would eventually become my wife and followed her back across the Channel to London (it’s a great story; I’ll share it with you another time).

Once I returned to Blighty, I realised the world of professional journalism was not for me. I kept writing film reviews for a while, but it never became anything more than a fun hobby. Meanwhile, I took some less-than-ideal day jobs. I wrote advertising copy for a while, then I worked for an educational start-up that quiet-fired me after less than a year (it’s an awful story; I’ll share it with you another time.)

Then the pandemic hit, and as the world retreated indoors I found myself itching for new stories. So I started writing them down. And now, here we are.

“Serious ideas from a silly man”

A satisfying book is one where you take a silly conceit seriously, where you prove the emotional possibilities of it.

Kaliane Bradley

I find it hard to describe the stories that I choose to write. In the broadest sense they’re science-fiction and fantasy, but they’ve always felt too soft — too close to reality — for that term. I suspect people in the publishing industry would describe them as ‘speculative fiction’, but I don’t know if I like that term either. As my good friend Joe put it: “spec fic is a term publishers use when they’re too embarrassed to call something sci-fi or fantasy.”

My stories tend to be about pretty heavy subjects: guilt and self-loathing; writers’ block; the existential dread of new parenthood. Cheery stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. But because I have difficulty facing such topics head-on, I look at them through a filter of Weird: taxi-driving psychopomps; orangutans with typewriters; a zombie apocalypse where the infection is spread through Dad jokes. (Yes, I have written about all of those). They’re very serious ideas, written by a very silly man.

If you enjoy the works of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett or John Scalzi, you’ll probably enjoy my stuff too.

So what does the W stand for?

Wilson. It was my grandfather’s name.

Competitions and publications

2025

2024

  • Sheffield Novel Slam: FINALIST

2023

  • Sheffield Novel Slam: FINALIST

2022

  • Sheffield Novel Slam: FINALIST