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Early Life and Context

1988 - 2002

Michael Lieber was born Michael John Griffiths on the 6th of May 1988 in The Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield, England. At age nine his parents divorced and he joined his Mother (Georgina) and three siblings (John, Emily and Jenna) in relocating to a port town called Tenby in South Wales (their new home was right by the harbor, a yellow house called Sheerwater). His Father (Alan) stayed in the Midlands to run the family business (a factory in Walsall called Rayburn). Lieber’s creative nature during these formative years, manifested in the form of busking and he could be found around the port from the age of ten, juggling and performing magic tricks to make up his pocket money. But despite his many talents, Lieber as a child remained completely illiterate even as he approached his 11th birthday, it was by order of his Father in 1998 that he was moved back to the Midlands on his own, to attend schooling at the Maple Hayes Dyslexia Institute in Lichfield (now known as the Maple Hayes School for Dyslexics), the Institute resided within an old stately manor on top of a hill, behind gated security and was run by its founders Dr. Neville Brown and Dr. Daryl Brown who were pioneering a new and controversial teaching technique called 'The Morpheme Method’; the method required the subject to memories hundreds of symbols, each one representing a different segment of every single word in the English language. Lieber was one of ten children involved in the study. Although resistant and homesick at first, it was a chance conversation with the two doctors that sparked a change within him, stating that if he didn’t learn to write, all the stories he had in his head would one day die with him and be lost forever; after this, he committed to the method entirely, the result  of which was a remarkable outcome, his illiteracy shrank away with every symbol  he  memorised, mastering  Shakespeare's iambic pentameter in a matter of hours; soon he was reading through countless books in the institute’s private library, and eventually began to write his own simple works. Although most of his writings from this period were either lost or destroyed, one narrative poem survives; 'Elle’s Logic', which he later adapted into one of his novellas (The Boy And The Goldlock). During his five years at the Institute, he was deemed in one scientific study, to be ‘a child prodigy of the Morpheme Method’, and to this day, Lieber remains one of the best case studies for its validity.

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2003 - 2024

Upon leaving the institute at fifteen, Lieber found himself at a loss, until a stage manager and friend of the family, suggested he be placed in a production of Oliver Twist that was being staged at the Garrick Theatre in the summer months of 2003. Lieber agreed and filled in for one of the workhouse boys; before long, he became enchanted by the theatre and adored the flamboyant company of actors; this led to a brief enrolment to The Oxford School Of Speech And Drama, but he soon dropped out after six months, declaring "Drama schools seek to destroy any and all natural talent", before moving to London in 2008 to make his name as a playwright and actor. He would spend a total of seven years in London studying the plays of Oscar Wilde and began work on a three-act farce entitled 'Conning the Vales'. In 2011, he witnessed the burning down of the Tandem Centre during the London Riots and help defend The Royal Standard pub in Colliers Wood from looters and petrol bombs; he also starred in a number of films throughout this period, including the award winning period drama Ramanujan in 2014, and the psychological thriller A Room To Die For produced by Sony Pictures in 2017. During a production of Salome at the Courtyard Theatre, he began a romantic and quite public relationship with the actress Atlanta Johnson, but this would be short lived. Lieber became increasingly disenchanted with the London theatre scene and in early 2015, he moved back to Lichfield and settled down romantically with his proof reader Laura Kaminski. He acquired an apartment in the centre of the city (flat A, Worthington House on Bird Street), he would spend a total of six years at this residence and is were he wrote his first three novels, beginning with 'The War Hero' which was a prose adaptation of his unperformed stage play 'Conning the Vales'. Upon finishing his second and third, The Boy And The Goldlock (2021) and Helga Dune (2022), it became apparent that his prose style was changing, taking on a far simpler and shorter form and often delving in to allegorical fairy tales, similar to that of Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm. In 2024, he began work on his first collection of fables for children.