John Aberdein was born and educated in Aberdeen.
After a spell herring-fishing and scallop-diving on the West Coast,
he taught Outdoor Education and/or English
in Fife, Hampshire and Orkney.
He began writing fiction in his forties.
His early stories in Doric appeared in Ahead of Its Time (Ed. Duncan McLean, Jonathan Cape, 1997).

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Amande's Bed (Thirsty Books, Saltire First Book Award, 2005) is a historically accurate reincarnation,
narrated month-by-month, of Aberdeen in 1956, 
with a whole panoply of characters,
and told from a working-class, internationalist perspective.

Amande's Bed is a good blasting story, a great river-rush of language
and a book made of the combination of wisdom, energy and generosity.
Startling, deeply bawdy, hilarious, dark, sweet, crowded and alive.
In the end it moved me to tears. 
Ali Smith, The Guardian

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Strip the Willow (Polygon, Scottish Arts Council Fiction of the Year, 2010) was written as a futuristic take
on the ravages cities can suffer under corporate takeover.
Sadly within months of publication it became obvious that for Aberdeen this was a pretty accurate prophecy.
Running through Strip the Willow is a salty love story, straddling back as far as  1968,
that era of some social and much sexual revolution, just before the start of the oil era.

Strip the Willow is as darkly dystopian and uncannily prophetic as its predecessor was tenderly, lyrically nostalgic.
We’re once again in the city of Aberdeen, but in a future where ‘Uberdeen’ is being nothing less than shafted
by the global corporation ‘LeopCorp’, which has taken over the bankrupt city council.
Gavin Wallace, Literature Director, Scottish Arts Council

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