Look and Listen

Biography

Leighton Gage has lived in Australia, Europe, and South America, traveled widely in Asia and Africa. He’s been a copywriter, an advertising creative director, a magazine editor, and a writer/producer/director of documentary films and industrial videos. He visited Spain in the time of Franco, Portugal in the time of Salazar, South Africa in the time of apartheid, Chile in the time of Pinochet, Argentina in the time of the junta, Prague, East Germany, and Yugoslavia under the Communist yoke. Fluent in three languages, and with a good working knowledge of three more, he’s previously published a non-fiction work on television commercial production, ( O Filme Publicitário ), a book which became the standard for teaching film and video production to a generation of Brazilians and Portuguese. During his advertising career, he won over 130 awards for creative excellence and was a jury member in all of the world’s major advertising film festivals, including the Lions Festival at Cannes, The Clio Awards, The New York Film Festival and the One Show of the Art Director’s Club of New York. He has been a featured speaker in such widely diversified venues as Helsinki, Hong Kong, and Bombay. Leighton now writes full time. He has two daughters in The Netherlands and two more in the United States. He and his wife spend much of their time in Brazil, her native country.

Inspiration

Brazil has a population of one-hundred-eighty-million people occupying a land mass larger than the continental United States. The country puts satellites into space, dominates nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, boasts the world's second largest fleet of private jets, exports automobiles, weaponry, aircraft and consumer electronics. It has millions of acres of arable land, exports agricultural products to every continent, ranks ninth among the world's economies -- and has an unevenness of income distribution second only to Bangladesh. The wealthiest ten per cent of the population enjoy more than fifty percent of the national income. Fifty-four million Brazilians live below the poverty line. A miniscule fraction of one percent of the population owns half the arable land, while twenty-five million agricultural workers survive on two dollars a day. As a result of all of this, land wars - one of the subjects treated in my first novel "Blood of the Wicked" have arisen between the "haves" and "have nots". No one really knows how many lives have been lost in these wars, but documented cases exceed fifteen-hundred, one of whom was Dorothy Stang, an American Nun. She was shot dead (two bullets in the face) on the twelfth of February, 2005, four months short of her seventy-fourth birthday.