Christopher Vanier

The author of "Caribbean Chemistry", Christopher Ralph Vanier, was born in 1942 on the tiny island of St. Kitts in the British West Indies. He has two children and now lives in France.

The USIA awarded him the Caribbean-wide sesquicentennial Lincoln Essay Prize in 1959, and a year later he won the Leeward Islands Scholarship. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1965, then crossed the Atlantic and obtained a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Syracuse University.

Leaving America for Paris, he worked as an engineer and IT specialist for 30 years, calculating the dynamics of trains, the feasibility of thermal energy from the sea, and the reliability of business computer systems.

In 2001, he began writing full time. His first book won a prize in the Kingston University Life Writing Competition and KUP published "Caribbean Chemistry" in December 2009. The memoir book about his Caribbean childhood contains a new chapter on Lincoln, and he was a guest of honour at the Oxford conference on Global Lincoln.

He left Paris for Fontainebleau after the death of his wife, and dedicated his second memoir book "On the Run in Fontainebleau" to navigating the perils of retirement, published in 2019.