He had a number of short stories published before his first books, the science fiction novel Run to the Stars and the non-fiction First Byte.
In the "Author's Note" to The Lord of Middle Air, Rohan asserted that he and Walter Scott have a common ancestor in Michael Scot, who is a character in the novel.
According to his entry on the website of the Little, Brown Book Group,[2] "after many years in Oxford and Yorkshire (they moved to Leeds in 1984),[3] he and his American wife Deborah (Archives Conservator for Cambridgeshire)[3] lived (as of 1994)[3] in a small village near Cambridge, next to the pub."
[3] He asserted that during his time studying, and after, he held various casual jobs, including "librarian, software technical writer, editor, translator, and shipping rare botanical specimens around the world".
[1] Rohan "from an early age ... read voraciously, everything from Dan Dare to the Larousse Mythology, Conan Doyle, C. S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, not Narnia), Tolkien, and his older sister's copy of Lady Chatterley".
[4] He enjoyed classical music and cited amongst his favourite composers Richard Wagner (and rated himself an authority on opera), Mozart, Sibelius, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov.