After helping more than 1,000 schoolchildren become published authors through his day job, Richard Seymour decided to have a go at writing a book himself.

Richard, a project officer for widening participation outreach programme Higher Horizons, has now published Members Only, a philosophical comedy set in heaven.

He joined Higher Horizons, based at Keele University, in 2017 and has led the White Water Writers project, which gives pupils the opportunity to collaboratively write and publish a novel in one week. So far, an impressive 127 books have been published on Amazon under the project's pen name of T.M. Cooks.

Richard said: "I've always been incredibly inspired by the children, and how they work together to write and publish a novel in a single week, which can sometimes be 30,000 words long, often with very little help or guidance from adults. They take total ownership of the project and they often surprise the teachers and themselves, and it helps raise their expectations because they start to think 'if I can write a book in one week, what else could I do'?

Richard's idea for his book, which has been published online on Amazon, came to him while on holiday in Italy.

He said: "I couldn't sleep one night and just started writing things down. I like to read books by Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, and my thinking was just to write something that I would like to read and to go from there.

"Seeing what the children can do in the space of a week got me thinking and I sat down with the intention of writing 100 words a day, but once I started the floodgates opened and one chapter became two, and so on.

"It's great to see the book published on Amazon and I've recently started on a second one, which is currently a work in progress. I can't write quite as quickly as the children do, but they've certainly given me huge inspiration."