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Martin Rothery (AKA Damon Rathe) started creative writing in September 2008 after enrolling on a creative writing course at the local college wanting to develop his writing style and ideas and has never looked back since.
By June 2009 he had joined the Holmfirth Writers' Group and March 2010 he became the treasurer.
After having had a few poems published, an article in a cat magazine and self published his first charity book Nonagenarians in remembrance of his grandparents and their writing, everything had been leading up to the first defining moment - the release of COWS!, his first novel.
Since then, in 2012 he's started his own independent publishing company, Fishcake Publications (www.fishcakepublications.com), released and co-authored another book of short stories, Souls of Darkness, under the pen name of Damon Rathe, published the prequel to Cows! titled Sheep and has just released his first full novel under the guise of Damon Rathe called Human Rights: Undead Set on Living.
Preferring to write children's stories and horror/fantasy/sci-fi he likes to release the former under his own name and the latter under his writing pseudonym. Damon Rathe is the dark side of Martin Rothery that sometimes wishes to be let out.
Martin is also an illustrator and cover designer and has done the covers for COWS!, Sheep, County Tales, Murgatroyd's Christmas Club, Human Rights and A Fistful of Marigolds as well as some of the internal images for Souls of Darkness. This allows him to do all the work in house at Fishcake Publications.
He often does workshops for children in the local community (if this of interest, please get in touch) and Huddersfield Libraries and has recently been involved with the Pageturners Festival in Huddersfield and will be involved in some way at the Holmfirth Arts Festival in 2014. He also loves going on residential writing weekends like the ones run by the National Association of Writers Groups and can usually be found at the Wentworth Castle, Barnsley retreat every year.
In the future, as well as continuing to write, Martin is excited to be working with a host of debut novelists as an editor and bringing new authors into the spotlight as a publisher very soon.
Reviewed by Ray Simmons for Readers' Favorite
Not since Animal Farm by the legendary George Orwell have I seen such an entertaining and astute use of animals to portray the foibles of people. Martin D. Rothery has created a book that is both funny and philosophical in Cows! Imagine for a minute that cows are intelligent, very intelligent. Now imagine that they don’t care very much for humans and even some of their fellow barnyard creatures. Finally, imagine they have a plan, a brilliant plan, and it will be initiated tomorrow morning. That is where you find yourself in the opening pages of Cows! From there you join Farmer Ken, Jimmy, Flossy, and all the other wonderful citizens of this little village in the Yorkshire hills. No one does understated wit better than the English.
I cannot overemphasize the sheer mastery of satirical wit that Martin D. Rothery displays in Cows! I started laughing on the first page and I laughed at every page up to the very end. There is brilliance, warmth, and an obvious mastery of observational skills displayed on every page. But most of all, it’s just funny and that’s what any work is supposed to do; entertain. If I tell you too much about it, I will spoil the wonderful page by page discovery that reading Cows! entails. Maybe I have told you too much already, but I had to give you something to whet your curiosity. Cows! is very good and well worth every penny you lay out for it. The characters are believable both bovine, human, and even other species.
