U.V. Ray was born in Birmingham, England in 1967. He attended the Blue Coat School, but after dropping out of the "indoctrination system" at the age of 15 without any qualifications, he embarked on a life of hedonistic excess; spending the next 17 years of his life drifting around back street bars and nightclubs, surrounding himself with a colourful array of oddball characters and misfits. His life became a catalogue of bar room brawls, smashed up cars and trashed hotel rooms, with a little bit of writing in between. Most of his work during this tumultuous period was scribbled on beer mats and cigarette packets and has almost certainly been lost for all time. In 1993, U.V. Ray began taking his writing more seriously and he started submitting work to underground literature magazines. He had his first poem published in the Cambridgeshire magazine, Candelabrum, in 1995. The Blood In My Veins is a collection of some of his published works which were written over the subsequent decade. He lives and writes in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire. http://www.uvray.moonfruit.com/