DAVID V BARRETT has been a teacher of Religious Studies and English, a computer programmer and intelligence analyst for the British and American governments, and a journalist.  He has been a full-time freelance writer since 1991.  As an author he now researches and writes mainly on religious and esoteric subjects.  In 1997 he began working on a PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics, studying new religious movements; he is a frequent speaker on this subject at conferences, and on radio and television.

THE NEW BELIEVERS (Cassell 2001) is a major study of new religious movements, incorporating a fully revised, updated and greatly-expanded version of his well-received source book Sects, "Cults" & Alternative Religions (Blandford 1996), with much completely new material on the problems of new religions in society.

A new edition of an earlier book, SECRET SOCIETIES, was published in 2007. This is a detailed study of movements with esoteric beliefs through the ages, including the Gnostics, Cathars, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians and Freemasons.  Between them, his various books have so far been published in fourteen languages and eighteen countries.

He is a regular book critic; his work has appeared in newspapers and magazines, including the TLS, Independent, Literary Review, New Scientist, New Statesman & Society, Spectator, City Limits, Fortean Times, Catholic Herald, Gnosis, British Book News and the Internet bookshop amazon.co.uk, amongst many others.  He has contributed to several specialist encyclopaedias including The Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained (2007), and is frequently consulted by publishers and by other writers.  He edited Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, for 25 issues from 1985 to 1989.  He was chairman of the 1990 Milford Writers' Conference.  From 1992 to 1995 he was administrator and chairman of the judges of the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction.

When not researching and writing, he plays fretless bass in the rock-jazz-blues band Midnight -- see www.midnight-music.info .
He lives in London, England.