He served as a teacher in Senegal with the charity Voluntary Service Overseas for a year, after which he earned a first in law at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford.
[5] He tried to enter into film producing in the early 1990s, but his efforts did not come to fruition, and The New York Times described him as "broke and adrift" at that stage in his life; he had also been diagnosed with melanoma, though he would recover.
£60,000 in debt, he decided to write the story as a novel as opposed to a screenplay, having felt burned by his previous attempts to mount his own film.
[7] It was made into a film in 1998; Robert Redford directed, and he starred opposite Kristin Scott Thomas, along with Scarlett Johansson and Sam Neill.
[2][1] Evans, Cumming and several of their relatives were poisoned in September 2008 after mistakenly consuming deadly webcap mushrooms that they gathered on holiday in Morayshire.