About Alex Golder-Wood
The Writer from Derbyshire
Alex Golder-Wood lives in Derbyshire, England, where the weather is perpetually grey, the tea is strong, and the perfect conditions exist for brooding over a laptop while contemplating the darker corners of the human psyche.
Like many writers, Alex's journey to authorship wasn't exactly linear. After years of battling his own mental health gremlins (who, it turns out, make terrible houseguests but excellent creative consultants), he discovered that the best therapy was channeling all that existential dread into fictional characters who could carry the burden instead.
"I realised I had two options," Alex says. "Continue having daily staring contests with my ceiling at 3 AM, or make my anxiety earn its keep by putting it to work in my novels. The anxiety union wasn't happy about it, but here we are."
Writing from Experience
Alex's debut novel, 'Shadows of the Green,' was inspired by watching his friends navigate their own mental health struggles while pretending everything was "sound, mate." Growing up in working-class England, he witnessed firsthand how men would rather gnaw off their own arm than admit they might need to talk about their feelings.
"Where I'm from, the closest thing to therapy was having a pint and saying 'could be worse' repeatedly until you believed it," he reflects. "I wanted to write about what happens when 'could be worse' stops working."
His writing explores themes of masculinity, friendship, trauma, and the peculiarly British art of suffering in silence while insisting you're "absolutely fine, honestly."
When Not Writing
When he's not crafting psychological thrillers or staring dramatically out of rain-streaked windows (it's practically a job requirement), Alex can be found:
• Starting ten different book projects simultaneously and finishing approximately none of them
• Abusing the Oxford comma with reckless abandon
• Having passionate debates with his characters at 2 AM (they usually win)
• Consuming dangerous amounts of coffee
• Pretending he understands social media while secretly being terrified of it
Alex believes that the best stories come from the places we're afraid to look, and that sometimes the only way out of the darkness is to write your way through it. Preferably with a cup of coffe and a dark sense of humor as companions.