Ian Smith was born in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, but at the age of 11 he moved with his family to the town of Peebles in the Borders region of Scotland. His brother and sisters still live there now. Since then, he has lived in England, Switzerland, Japan, Ethiopia, North Korea, Libya, Tunisia and Sri Lanka, as well as spending shorter stints working in India, the Republic of Ireland, Egypt, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar and Mauritius. He currently lives in Singapore.
Over the years he has worked a lot in education. In addition to being a teacher, he has served as an academic manager, a classroom assistant, an educational consultant, a one-to-one tutor, a teacher-trainer and a university lecturer. But he has also put in time as a bookshop assistant, a cleaner in a skin clinic, a farmhand, a general dogsbody for a consultancy firm while it was researching the fish-processing area of Aberdeen Harbour, a grape-picker, a hop-picker, a kitchen porter, a member of a nightclub’s floor-staff, a night porter, a proof-reader, a supermarket shelf-stacker and truck unloader, a trainee journalist, a travel-book researcher, a volunteer at a special home for boys with behavioural issues (or ‘maladjusted boys’ as they were called back in those un-PC days), a warehouseman and a youth hostel warden. The nightclub floor-staff job was definitely the worst one. No thanks for those memories, Aberdeen Ritzy’s.
When he finds time, he writes short stories — horror, science fiction and fantasy ones as well as mainstream ‘literary’ ones, as snobby critics like to call them. These have been published in magazines, webzines and newspapers such as Aphelion, the Belfast Telegraph, Blood Moon Rising, Close 2 the Bone, Death Head Grin, the Dream Zone, the Eildon Tree, Flashes in the Dark, Groundswell, Gutter, Hellfire Crossroads, the Honest Ulsterman, Horla, Horrified Magazine, the Horror Zine, Hungur, Legend, ParABnormal Magazine, the Peeblesshire News, Roadworks, Scratchings, Schlock! Webzine, Shotgun Honey, the Sirens Call, Sorcerous Signals, the Stygian Lepus, Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Whetstone, Witch House and Write.
His fiction has also appeared in the anthologies The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years, The Cryptid Chronicles, Fall into Fantasy 2023, Fearful Fun, Horror Stories from Horrified Volume 1: Christmas and Volume 2: Folk Horror, Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days, Nightmare Fuel: Objects of Horror 2022 and Mind Terrors 2023, Railroad Tales, Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 3, Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures and Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology.
He won the Peebles Art Festival short fiction competition in 1998 and Northern Ireland’s Brian Moore short story of the year competition in 1999. He has also done research and writing about Japan and Ethiopia for the Fodor’s and Footprint guidebooks series and is the author of two non-fiction books about his local football teams in Scotland, Peebles Rovers and Tweeddale Rovers.
His work has appeared under the pseudonyms Jim Mountfield (for horror stuff), Rab Foster (for fantasy stuff), Steve Cashel (for non-horrific, non-fantastical Scottish stuff), Paul McAllister (for non-horrific, non-fantastical Irish stuff)… and, occasionally, under his own boring name.