Dale Hurst has been “writing” since the age of five, when he fell in love with the story of Peter Pan and spent the Easter holidays writing and illustrating his own adaptation for his class. A lover of film, television and theatre, he dabbled with ideas for plays, series and movies until he was ten. This is when he wrote a fantasy adventure story about a vampire living in 19th century France.

However, his first real foray into historical fiction came during his GCSE years, where he wrote a short crime story set in a fictional market town called Berylford. This story, entitled Suffer the Children, lay the foundation for the setting of what would become his first novel, The Berylford Scandals: Lust & Liberty. He didn’t keep any characters from Suffer the Children, but the events of that story are mentioned in the earlier chapters of Lust & Liberty, regarding a series of historic child murders.

The Berylford Scandals: Lust & Liberty was followed by its sequel Sin & Secrecy in 2020. The next major work will be a wartime thriller set in a Berlin hotel, entitled You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic.

Presenter

As a confident public speaker with a background in performance, Dale has had a substantial career in presenting, beginning on radio at university in 2012. Since then, he has presented cooking demos on YouTube, interviewed MPs for BBC Radio, and more recently chaired four seasons of the HQB News official podcast Bournemouth Backchat.

He now hosts The Dale Hurst Writing Show, a fortnightly podcast discussing various subjects surrounding writing, publishing, and storytelling.

Journalist

While he much prefers writing fiction, Dale’s career thus far has been in journalism. It started in 2012, when he founded a restaurant critique and travel writing blog called Expensive Tastes, which he kept running until 2020. He trained in Southampton at Solent University, where he worked on a number of high-profile stories, including HM Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to the city and the public’s violent reaction to the filming of Immigration Street, both in 2015.

Since graduating, Dale’s reviews, features, and stories have been seen in publications such as Sauce, The Wiltshire Times, and The Chef’s Forum. But most of his recent work comes from HQB News, an online positive news, lifestyle, and human-interest platform, where he served as editor from 2019 until its closure in 2021. At HQB News, Dale interviewed a variety of influential people local to the Bournemouth, Poole, and Christchurch areas in print and on video.

Dale’s last journalistic role was at the international cryptocurrency news website BeInCrypto, which he left in August 2021. While now retired from journalism, he still writes the occasional restaurant review.