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
he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who upon the death of her Aldershot-based husband had initially returned to Ireland with her daughter - John O'Loughlin's mother-to-be - after a lengthy marital absence) in the mid-50s and subsequently attended schools in
Aldershot, Hampshire and, with an enforced change of denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been put into
care by his mother the death and repatriation of his ethnically-protective grandmother, Carshalton, Surrey. Leaving in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an
assortment of CSEs
(Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs
(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 venues throughout the British Isles for the various ABRSM classical music exams.
After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to do English and History A'Levels, he returned to his former job in the West End
but, due to a combination of factors, left the Associated Board 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 (within the local YMCA complex) 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 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).
