Ralph Johnson

Biography

Ralph Johnson writes about the hinges of ordinary lives. He is drawn to old railway stations, mountain weather and the kind of conversations that only happen on long journeys, when strangers have nowhere else to be and nothing left to prove.

He writes early, before the day has decided what it wants from him, with a pot of strong coffee, a notebook, and a window onto whatever the sky is doing. His shelves lean toward novels that trust silence: books where very little seems to happen and everything changes.

The Switch began with a single image: a woman walking alone down a rain-wet platform beneath the Pyrenees, pulling a suitcase toward a station far too grand for the handful of travellers who still pass through it. Ralph wanted to know who she was, and what she was walking away from. The answer took him from Zurich’s banking district to Amsterdam, Prague, Marseille and Barcelona, and back again.

When he isn’t writing, he is probably reading timetables for journeys he hasn’t taken yet.