Hutchinson was born at Farnworth, near Bolton, in Lancashire,[citation needed] but lives on Raasay, off the east coast of Skye.
[1] In the late 1960s, around the time he studied English at Bretton Hall College, he founded and edited 'Sad Traffic', published from a small office in Barnsley, which ran for five issues before morphing into Yorkshire's alternative newspaper, Styng (Sad Traffic Yorkshire News & Gossip).
[1][2][3] In the late 1970s Hutchinson moved to Skye to become a journalist on the West Highland Free Press.
[1][7] In 2012 Hutchinson published The Silent Weaver, the story of the Uist-raised crofter Angus MacPhee who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown during World War II and subsequently spent 50 years in Craig Dunain Hospital near Inverness where he developed skill in weaving grass taken from the hospital grounds.
[8] As of 2018, Hutchinson's most recent book is The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker: The story of Britain through its Census, since 1801 (2017).