About Will - 

The Master of Snooze-Worthy Tales

Will Hackett-Jones swapped Suffolk, England, for St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2003 at 23. 

He launched and ran Cool English Magazine (50 editions!) until 2008, then founded and ran Eclectic Translations for Russian film subtitles until 2022. 

Now, in his third act, he’s a novelist who accidentally crafted a kids’ sleep-aid: The Old Wooden House.

 That Shanghai-to-Auckland flight desperation? Turns out it was pure gold for sleepy parents!

- Dream: More dull tales for families to bond over, instead of bedtime battles.

Will Hackett-Jones is a British novelist and former BBC Radio Suffolk foreign correspondent who has lived in St Petersburg since 2003. He wrote The Old Wooden House, a deliberately dull bedtime story for ages 3–7, the comic spy series Igor's String Theory, and The Shugovka Yacht Club, a novel in progress.

Reading in Russian? Will's books in Russian are on willhj.ru.

Updated October 2026

Chap's gotta earn a living.