A native of Exeter, J. Edwin Skinner studied languages at the universities of Newcastle and Bristol, before moving to Germany for a brief period to work as a teacher.

On returning to the UK, he found his feet in the world of translation, a calling which eventually took him to Switzerland with his family to work for a multinational company.

When he quit corporate life to set up his own business, this new-found independence fostered an appetite for expressing his own creativity that had lain more or less dormant for too long, and he began to devote more time to writing fiction.

His interest in languages, which inevitably finds nourishment from living in the multilingual environment of Switzerland, often feeds into his writing, both for younger readers and for his adult fiction, which he writes under the pen name A.B. Decker.