Mike Gardner

Book: Willie - The Life and Times of Willie Horne, a Rugby League Legend.

Mike was born in 1951. He is a retired journalist who lives in Newent, Gloucestershire.

He was born in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, and worked as a compositor at the town’s newspaper, the North West Evening Mail, before being retrained as a reporter in 1987.

Mike eventually became the paper’s Features Editor before moving to Carlisle in 1995 to take up a position as Sports Editor of The Cumberland News.

He has won a host of writing awards including the prestigious Whitbread Feature Writer of the Year in 1991 and was highly-commended in the Sports Writer of the year award organised by UK Press Gazette in 1995.

Mike is married to Lesley and they have two grown-up children, John, a chemistry teacher at Oxford and David, an IT manager at a large comprehensive school at Churchdown, close to Cheltenham. Mike and Lesley have a grand-daughter, six-month-old Lily.

He spends his spare time cycling, playing golf and trying to improve his Spanish.