Roy Davies

Photograph of myself with a mist-shrouded Machu Picchu in the background. Taken after walking the Inca Trail, August 1997. I helped to write the book Explore the Inca Trail, with Jacquetta Megarry. The second edition is out, as is a new edition of the thriller Into the Fire which includes chapters set in Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail!

More details of these books are given at my Inca Trail to Machu Picchu website.

Who am I?

In June 2007 I took early retirement from the University of Exeter (but am retaining some connections with the university).

From September 2002 until then I was the librarian of the St. Luke's Campus, University of Exeter. I was also an honorary fellow of the Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry, now the University of Exeter Medical School. Previously I was the science and engineering librarian at the University of Exeter and was also responsible for coordination of access to electronic journals in all subjects. Here is a list of my publications. This is my e-mail address.

Academic and Literary Interests

Information retrieval has always been a particular interest. It is not only the technical aspect, which is being transformed by the use of computers, that I find interesting but also the wider impact of information on society. My list of publications includes articles on expert systems in cataloguing and in reference work, and techniques for discovering previously unnoticed logical connections in scientific literature.

In the early 1990s there was an explosion of commercial interest in the Web and in particular there was increasing amount of attention being paid to e-money and electronic commerce. In the inaugural issue of the British edition of Wired I wrote an article on the possible dangers of the commercialisation of the Internet, (though I am certainly not against commerce on the Net) and a fuller version of the article Should Information be Free? is available. I have compiled a Web page on the subject of e-money and another on all forms of money: past, present and future. My interest in the history of money comes from the research in this field by my father, Glyn Davies who was an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Wales and wrote a 700 page book on this subject, now in its third edition.

One of my brothers, the late John Davies (1952-2011), was a professor of economics at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and my other brother, Kenneth, is a geophysicist working for BP while my sister Linda Davies is a former merchant banker,turned writer, and author of the novels, Nest of Vipers and Wilderness of Mirrors, Into the Fire, Something Wild and Final Settlement. The first four in particular are set in the world of high finance. When Barings Bank collapsed the Canadian magazine Macleans wrote:

"Linda Davies has proven a point made years ago by Marshall McLuhan, who said that artists can warn us of future disasters. Three years ago, Davies wrote the novel Nest of Vipers about a computer whiz-kid who decides to exploit the system and make tons of money while being employed as a mole by the Bank of England. She wrote what 28-year-old Nick Leeson accomplished in Singapore last week."

I have also produced a set of web pages on the Financial Fiction Genre describing fiction in which banking and finance plays a significant role, from the times of authors such as Dumas, Dickens and Zola to the present. See also my page on financial scandals for information about shady dealings in fact as well as fiction.

Other Interests

I like travelling extensively, especially to places with spectacular scenery, and walking. As mentioned earlier, I have hiked the Inca Trail, twice in fact, and some chapters of my sister's third thriller, Into the Fire are set in that part of Peru. I have also climbed Kilimanjaro. Walking is a pastime which I frequently indulge in on my doorstep since Dartmoor, Exmoor and the coasts of north and south Devon are all nearby. As my father was Welsh and my mother is Danish, I am interested in most things to do with Wales and with Denmark and Scandinavia in general. I speak both Welsh and Danish reasonably well. My sister's first novel Nest of Vipers has been translated into Danish as Slangereden, published by Lindhardt og Ringhoff, and naturally I read that as well as the original version!

Mystery photograph of a Danish folk high school identified! My grandmother attended it in 1916.