Matthew Weait is an academic lawyer who completed the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College in 2009.  He has had short stories published by Fish and the Mechanics Institute Review, and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for a story that still has not found a home.  Much of the inspiration for his writing comes from a passage in Pascal: “The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so”.  The novel he will be working on at Cove Park, While There’s Still Light, explores how best to make do with what what we have through the first meeting of a man and the mother who gave him up to foster care fifty years earlier and never returned for him.  His reading tastes are eclectic, but among his favourite authors are J.G. Ballard, Patricia Highsmith and Muriel Spark.  In fiction he looks for the world I live in revealed in a way that his own experience occludes.