Billy Conn was born, brought up and educated in Ireland. What he saw and experienced as the bizarre world of his childhood spawned his interest in psychology. He regards himself as weaned on the wireless and the few available books then liberated by the library. Important too was a small number of good teachers who, like all of their kind, have the potential to change lives. There is something special about using a series of well-crafted questions to lead youthful dogmatists to see the absurdity that would follow from their assertions.
He read psychology at university then trained in that profession in Ireland before moving to the British mainland to practice. There he worked as a psychologist specializing in cases of severe abuse and neglect of children, routinely providing assessments and expert testimony to the courts.
For some 40 years he worked with the children, their families and the abusers. The children and young persons generated him an enormous respect for their courage and resilience. Upon retirement he returned to an earlier aspiration to write.
He has often said that he enjoys writing which he has likened to a conversation with a possibility but then he has also said both that it is hard work and not like work at all. Everyone has to make up their own minds about the weight to be put on what is said by people who make up things for a living.
Though his work took him all over the country, throughout his working life Billy lived in Kent. Now he divides his time between there and Ireland.