In 2004, Inventing Elliot was published in the US by Dial, an imprint of Penguin Books, and has since been translated into over 10 languages, including German, French, Greek, Polish, Spanish, Albanian and Korean.
[2] For more than ten years, Graham Gardner was an academic researcher, based at Aberystwyth University on the coast of West Wales, from where gained his PhD in 2003.
As an extension of this work, he subsequently advised the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) on the appropriateness and likely impact of giving parish and town councils in England a new general power to promote wellbeing.
His main concern in this role was with the significance of citizen empowerment for democracy, wellbeing and social justice, and his attempts to challenge mainstream thinking on the impact and potential implications of New Labour's 'new localism' agenda frequently caused controversy.
[4] In recognition of his contribution to debates over empowerment and localism, he has been profiled by Regeneration and Renewal magazine and made a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (FRSA).