Mark Allen was born in Leeds, grew up in Somerset and went to Bryanston school in Dorset. He graduated in social studies at Durham University and while there he launched a branch of International Voluntary Service, a peace organisation which brings together people from different parts of the world to work on specific projects. Both then and later, when living near Oldham, he was very involved in running a club for psychiatric patients. He became a reporter on the Sheffield Star. Three years later he joined the Daily Express in Manchester, first as a reporter and then a sub-editor. In the 1970s he was the editor of Community Care, which he had launched for IPC Business Press. Some forty years later he acquired that brand from Reed Business Information. In 1979 he was appointed the editor of Nursing Mirror. Four years later he was named тАШEditor of the YearтАЩ by the Professional Publishers Association, and Nursing Mirror was awarded the тАШBusiness Magazine of the YearтАЩ and the тАШCampaign of the YearтАЩ accolades. After a short stint with Thomson as a publisher in a newly-formed medical division which he headed, Mark effected a management buyout with two magazines. Today, his company, the Mark Allen Group, of which he is the executive chairman, publishes more than a hundred professional, business and consumer magazines and organises numerous events and exhibitions. It is perhaps the most successful independent family-owned publishing company launched in the UK during the last forty years. Married, with four children and seven grand-children, Mark also writes poetry, plays the tenor saxophone and enjoys walking, swimming, cricket and rugby. He and his wife, Sue, live in Wiltshire and London and also have a house in southwest France.