RENOWNED Giggleswick author Bill Mitchell, who has written more than a hundred books, is now seeing his work translated into Japanese.

Two of his books were written following a visit to the remote island of St Kilda in 1988. One of them, a biography of intrepid islander Finlay MacQueen, is now being translated for the Japanese market.

A spokesman for his publisher, House of Lochar, based on the Hebridean island of Colonsay, said: "Unfortunately there aren't thousands of dollars in this project for us, or for Bill Mitchell, but it does sound like a lot of yen."

The former editor of The Dalesman says that writing is occupational therapy. "I like to keep the brain cells stirred."

When he went to St Kilda, sited 50 miles west of the Scottish mainland, he sent a postcard home in a wooden container cast into an ebb tide. He had not been back long when it was picked up on a Hebridean beach and delivered to his home in Giggleswick.

Bill, 75, told the Craven Herald that the biography had been selected for the Japanese market because, being an island people themselves, they enjoying stirring stories of life on remote islands.

This is the first time that one of his books has been translated for sale abroad.

The jacket illustration for the translation is a drawing by Dales artist Janet Rawlins.