Geoffrey McSkimming is a children's novelist and poet. He is the author of the 19 volume Cairo Jim chronicles and Jocelyn Osgood jaunts and the Phyllis Wong series of mystery novels. He has also published three volumes of poetry. McSkimming was born in Sydney, Australia. To write his Cairo Jim stories, he travelled to Egypt, Peru, Tanzania, Greece, Mexico, Turkey, Italy and Singapore and other locations. He is much in demand for author talks, and appears with his wife, the magician Sue-Anne Webster, to promote the Phyllis Wong mysteries series. Geoffrey McSkimming has published more than fifty short stories in magazines and has contributed verse to various poetry anthologies. He narrated the Cairo Jim chronicles as audio books for Bolinda Publishing. The audio version of his book of verse, Ogre in a Toga and Other Perverse Verses, was shortlisted in the Audie Awards in 2008. He wrote five character tours which were performed in the galleries at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, Australia, from 2000 through 2013. In June 2006 Geoffrey McSkimming undertook an author tour of the UK for Walker Books, who released ten titles in the Cairo Jim series in the UK. Geoffrey McSkimming's 25th novel, Phyllis Wong and the Crumpled Stranger, was published in 2020 by 9 Diamonds Press. He is currently writing the eighth story in the Phyllis Wong Time Detective mysteries series. All titles in the Cairo Jim chronicles are now e-published by 9 Diamonds Press, and new print editions of the backlist are being rolled out. A completely new Cairo Jim novel will appear in 2021. Geoffrey McSkimming is represented by Curtis Brown Literary Agency, London.
Books
Phyllis Wong and the Crumpled Stranger
Phyllis Wong and the Vanishing Emeralds
Phyllis Wong and the Girl who Danced with Lightning
"When Geoffrey McSkimming was a boy he found an old motion-picture projector and a tin containing a dusty home movie in his grandmother's attic. He screened the film and was transfixed by the flickering image of a man in a jaunty pith helmet, baggy Sahara shorts and special desert sun-spectacles. The man had an imposing macaw and a clever looking camel, and Geoffrey Mcskimming was mesmerised by their activities in black-and-white Egypt, Peru, Greece, Mexico, Sumatra, Turkey, Italy and other exotic locations. Years later he discovered the identities of the trio, and has spent much of his time since then retracing their footsteps, interviewing surviving members of the Old Relics Society, and gradually reconstructing the lost true tales of Cairo Jim, which have become the enormously successful Cairo Jim chronicles."
