Miks Koljers (Mike Collier) was born May 14, 1971, exactly 16 years to the day since the signing of the Warsaw Pact. He grew up in Gloucester, England, a city chiefly notable for its cathedral, a breed of spotted pigs ideal for sausages and being home to Britain's most notorious serial killer.

Koljers was educated at Beaufort - which despite its name was not an exclusive private school - before studying English at the University of East Anglia where he was one of very few contemporaries not to enrol on the celebrated creative writing course run by Malcolm Bradbury. However, during this peiod Koljers was compared to Dylan Thomas by a posh girl who could not tell the difference between Welsh and West Country accents, and he was once locked in a room with Salman Rushdie (against his will).

By the mid-1990s Koljers was in London working for legendary 'King of Soho' Paul Raymond in a variety of shady jobs. During the sole direct conversation between the two, Koljers informed Raymond that no, he had not bought a new carpet.

Next, Koljers was recruited by the BBC to edit children's magazines for several years before moving to Bristol to edit the city's second-best listings magazine. By the turn of the millennium he was working as motoring editor for the UK's national Press Association, a role he continued to perform until a growing horror that he was starting to sound like Jeremy Clarkson forced him to flee the country in 2007.

Koljers has travelled widely in Central and Eastern Europe, once had to escape at night from a Ligurian castle and enjoyed a brief stint as an honorary member of the Bulgarian Navy.

He was formerly Baltic correspondent for Deutsche Presse-Agentur and is currently Latvia correspondent for Agence France-Presse. He lives somewhere near Cesis.