East Anglian Writers |
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Matthew Seal
Biography
My first 'book', I can now admit, was plagiarised. I was only 10 and
had compiled a collection of jokes and items of interest (such as
the Cockney alphabet) from comics and magazines I found in the
barber's shop in our Lincolnshire village. I seemed to go to Mr
Staff's every Saturday morning, 1956 being the age of very short
backs and sides, and had plenty of time to kill before he murdered
my hair anew. I still have that handwritten exercise book somewhere,
and although obviously unpublished in any sense it has thrilled
generations of kids in our family while equally dismaying their
parents.
The follows a hiatus of many years while formal education kills off
any artistic aspirations and I fall into a career of copyediting,
proofreading and indexing. I was lucky to start at Cambridge
University Press in 1970 at a time when publishing was still
'gentlemanly', technology was something only done in labs, and
telexes and Rubilith stencils ruled. My first editing job was on
John Bayley's Pushkin, still perhaps the most elegant book I've
worked on and ruining me for everything that has followed. My first
proofreading job, by contrast, was undoubtedly the most boring and
tedious I've ever had to face; with due excuses to welders, it was
Statistics for Pipe Welders. But guess which of the two remained in
print the longer!
Six apprentice years at CUP were followed by a variety of editorial
jobs, in-house and freelance, in the UK and South Africa. Many years
later I'm now fully freelance. In the later 1990s I ended up in a
newspaper office in Johannesburg as a 'revise subeditor', checking
the work of the other subeditors on Business Report. So, as I get
older I work on quicker and quicker media, from the production cycle
of maybe a year for a CUP book to the mayhem of a daily paper. No
logic in one's biography, is there?
I wrote, compiled and pasted-up a book celebrating the Centenary of
the Pirates Club, Johannesburg, in 1988, but the club spent too much
on parties and a new clubhouse for there to be any money left for
the book to be printed. I had better luck in 1999, on the verge of
leaving South Africa, when How To in Oxford commissioned me to write
on the immigrant experience in South Africa; the book appeared in
2000. I have co-edited a quarterly spiritual magazine, Science of
the Soul (now called Spiritual Link), for many years.
Current writing projects are Lucky Seal, a transcript of my father's
Second World War diaries as a paratrooper, and, in collaboration
with my wife, Julie Bruton-Seal, several books on aphrodisiac herbs
and vegan cookery. I am presently a director of the leading UK
editors' and proofreaders' group, the Society for Editors and
Proofreaders.
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