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John O’Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic of Ireland, of mixed Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army), he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who upon the premature death of her husband had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been put into a children's home by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his ethniocally-protective grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys. Upon leaving the latter in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an assortment of CSE’s (Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCE’s (General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London and went on, via two short-lived jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford Square, where he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues throughout Britain and Ireland for the Board's examiners. After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, he returned to his former job in the West End but, due to a combination of personal factors, quit the ABRSM in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which, despite a brief spell as a computer and office-skills tutor at Hornsey Management Agency in the late '80s and early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), An Interview Reviewed (1979), Secret Exchanges (1980), Sublimated Relations (1981), and Deceptive Motives (1981). Since the mid-80s John O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned several titles of a philosophical nature, including Devil and God (1985–6), Towards the Supernoumenon (1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and, more recently, The Best of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth (2009), Insane but not Mad (2011) and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).

John O'Loughlin

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