Mark Walden spent ten years working as a video games designer and producer. He recently left the industry to embark on a far more challenging/frightening career...full-time dad. He has a baby daughter and splits his time between writing and looking after her.

The inspiration for H.I.VE. came from a very unusual source. Mark says: ‘I was sitting at a friend's house and we were discussing how his cat Otto looked just like the cat that Blofeld owned in the James Bond movies. That led to me thinking about those kinds of villains in films and literature and how they never really have their origins explained and so I came up with the concept of HIVE to answer the question of how these mysterious characters learn how to take over the world. Obviously my friend's cat supplied a little help with my central character's name too...'

His debut novel is a comedy-thriller set in an elite school where children are trained to be supervillains.

H.I.V.E. takes some of the traditions of the school-based novel and subverts them. Here is a school where the students are actively encouraged to be as badly behaved as possible. H.I.V.E. is not the typical, nurturing environment that readers may be used to from other examples of this genre - this is a school whose central ethos is survival of the fittest and where failure can have fatal consequences.'

Website: http://www.bloomsbury.com/HIVE/

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