Born in 1952, Gordon Lawrie has lived and worked all his life in Edinburgh. Until 2011, he was a Modern Studies - politics, for the uninitiated -  teacher in a very large secondary school in a very inappropriate high-rise building.

Then, in that year, the local authority were so desperate to get rid of Gordon and a fair few like him that he was offered a 'golden goodbye'. That gave him the chance to do something he'd always wanted to do: write a novel. His first attempt was pretty dreadful, but then he wrote "Four Old Geezers And A Valkyre", a romantic comedy about four sad superannuated wannabe rockstars who accidentally have a couple of YouTube hits. They then have to work out a way of making some money from them...

Gordon is also a prolific short story writer and essayist, as well as an occasional poet and journalist. One of his short stories, "The Piano Exam", was written as a prequel to "Four Old Geezers", but the character Mary Maxwell-Hume was so popular that in 2017 he wrote a further nine stories about her. These will appear shortly under the collective title "The Discreet Charm of Mary Maxwell-Hume."

Gordon is also a flash fiction writer, specialising in the 'drabble' form which is exactly 100 words long. In 2016 he published '100 Not Out', a first collection of the best of these.

Gordon's second novel "The Blogger Who Came In From The Cold" is due for publication in 2018.

Gordon is also the founding director of the Edinburgh self-publishing co-operative Comely Bank Publishing, whose authors include Emma Baird, T. D. Burke, Jane Tulloch, Roland Tye and Greg Michaelson.