Born in the small village of Dymchurch on the Romney Marshes in Kent, England, Rik only lives part-time on Earth; for the past three and a half decades much of his spare time has been spent in his constructed world, Kalieda. The Kalieda novels, starting with 'The Gods in the Jungle', are intended to be a gateway into the Kalieda world, offering people glimpses of the world through stories based on the histories and mythologies of the people who live in that world. The novels can be thought of as the 'bottom-up' complement to the online Kalieda Encyclopaedia - a 'top-down' approach to displaying the world on the web. Poetically, Rik has been writing since he was nipper, though no work from that early period survives, thanks to a fortuitous kitchen fire (which may or may not have been started deliberately). The RikVerse website is a 'living book' of Rik's poetry: all his poems can be found online there. The website is regularly updated as new poems are written and old poems updated.