Welsh, T.K. 1956–

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Welsh, T.K. 1956–

(J. Gregory Sandom, J.G. Welsh)

PERSONAL:

Born December 19, 1956, in Chicago, IL; son of Zane Joseph (a financial services executive) and Else (a cosmetics industry manager) Sandom; married Julia Clare Pendleton Gallagher (an advertising executive), June 9, 1987 (marriage ended); children: a daughter. Education: Amherst College, B.A., 1978. Hobbies and other interests: Fishing.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Princeton, NJ. Office—Einstein & Sandom, Inc., 6 W. 18th St., 5F, New York, NY 10011. Agent—Ms. Geri Thoma, Elaine Markson Literary Agency, 44 Greenwich Ave., New York, NY 10011.

CAREER:

Writer, advertising executive, and consultant. Hill & Knowlton, Inc., New York, NY, account executive/public relations, 1978-79; The Rowland Company, New York, NY, account executive/media consultant, 1979-80; The Sandom Company, New York, NY, marketing consultant, 1980-86; Einstein & Sandom, Inc. (a multi-media marketing and interactive advertising agency), chief executive officer and creative director, beginning 1986; associated with OgilvyInteractive; RappDigital, founder and served as vice chairman until 2002.

MEMBER:

Association of InterActive Multimedia Marketing (president, 1991—).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Academy of American Poets prize, 1978, for "The First Time."

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Gospel Truths (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1992.

The Hunting Club, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1993.

Also author of The Blue Men, The Publicist, and The Wave, and "The First Time."

YOUNG ADULT NOVELS AS T.K. WELSH

The Unresolved, Dutton Children's Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Resurrection Men, Dutton Juvenile (New York, NY), 2007.

Also author of children's novel The Seed of Icarus.

SIDELIGHTS:

T.K. Welsh has worked in advertising and marketing and is the author of both adult novels and, writing as T.K. Welsh, young adult novels. In his 1992 novel, Gospel Truths, the author presents Scotland Yard Inspector Nigel Lyaman, who is working on a reopened, twenty-year-old case concerning the suicide of an Italian banker in London. The inspector's investigation soon leads him to the Vatican and a twisted affair involving blackmail and money laundering. Sandom's next book, The Hunting Club, is about a bachelor's party that ends in the death of a prostitute and, as a result, changes the lives of five friends forever. Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, writing in Entertainment Weekly, noted that the author's "writing about men's murderous instincts is often poetic."

In his young adult novel The Unresolved, written under the name T.K. Welsh, Sandom presents a ghost story focusing on a real-life steamboat disaster in New York in 1904. The story is told by the ghost of fifteen-year-old Mallory Meer, who was on the ship with a church group. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that Mallory's ghost seems unable to depart until those responsible for the fire are brought to justice. In the meantime, her boyfriend Dustin Brauer is thought by some to have caused the accident by throwing away a cigarette. Vicky Smith, writing in Horn Book, called The Unresolved "a tightly wound novel of conflicting interests and emotions that keep Mallory haunting long after the inquests are concluded." Lisa Prolman, writing in the School Library Journal, noted that the author "shows readers the neighborhood's vibrancy and prejudices and helps them to understand how justice worked in early-20th-century New York."

Resurrection Men is also a young adult novel. An orphaned beggar named Victor arrives in London, where he finds grave robbers and a local prominent doctor who molests girls and experiments on children by infecting them with cholera. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that the book was not for readers "with even an ounce of squeamishness."