Adrian Churchward is an English solicitor who has worked in commercial law practices for over thirty years in London, Los Angeles and Eastern Europe. He holds an M.Phil. from Essex University in Comparative International Law. His hobbies include writing and film- making.
He first acquired a taste for Russian culture in his early teens when he immersed himself in the works of Dostoyevsky and Gogol, rather than the school's curriculum of Shakespeare and Chaucer. A sight-seeing visit to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) followed in 1973 and laid the foundations of his life-long interest in the Russian people and language.
In the latter years of the 1970s he worked as European counsel to a Los Angeles firm whose senior partner had been a US Airforce pilot in the Vietnam War and whose stories sowed the seeds of Adrian's fascination with the US-Soviet proxy conflict. Within a few years of his return to the UK Adrian was on his travels again. From the mid-1980s until the end of the 1990s he worked in Moscow, Budapest and Prague as an East-West trade lawyer, helping EU and American corporations operate in the fast-disintegrating communist economies and then in the anarchy of the Yeltsin years, when state assets were auctioned off at rock bottom prices to the "new-Russian biznizmeni", some of whom survived to become the powerful oligarchs we know today. During this period he learnt Russian and became proficient in translating Russian commercial and legal texts into English
He has co-written and co-produced a short film called Paranoia which was shown at the Budapest Film Festival in September 2013.
He is now based back in London where semi-retirement allows him the time to develop his writing career.
Books Published
Moscow Bound is the first book in a trilogy of novels dealing with state abuse of power. All three novels find Scott Mitchell, an English human rights lawyer, constantly fighting the all-pervasive corruption of the power elites, not only in authoritarian Russia, but closer to home in the so-called transparent liberal democracies of the European Union and the United States.