A 21-YEAR-old who works in a popular Taunton café has become a published author and launched his own publishing company, and will be leaving to study in Japan in March.
Ben Clarke, who works as a barista in 9.15 café, is the author of a middle-grade fantasy book called Peter Relish: The Sword of Hecate, published in 2023 and a short general fiction novel called Crying Over Flowers, published in October 2025.
To publish these novels, he launched his own indie publishing house, Frozen Moon Press and worked closely with a mentor with years of experience in the publishing industry.
When asked about his inspirations, Ben said: “I started creative writing when I was around 14-15. I wasn’t very academic at school or anything, but I just enjoyed writing.
“I first started writing my fantasy novel in 2019 when I was 16, and it took me about four years to write and publish it. That was the whole process and my first time publishing a book.”
He added: “I don’t really know why I wanted to write a book, but as I got into it, I really started to enjoy it, the more I wrote, the more I realised it was something I wanted to do.”
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Currently, Ben is looking forward to his next stages, which include a sequel to his fantasy novel that he is currently writing and a prequel, which he hopes to write in the future.
He said: “Right now, I am writing the next book in the Peter Relish series, which I am hoping will come out at the end of this year, and I want to write at least three books in the series, including a really fun prequel, which I have lined up.”
Ben is also getting ready to start a liberal arts degree at Sophia University in Tokyo, where he hopes to improve his Japanese and study creative writing.
He said: “I am really excited, a little bit nervous, but excited overall. I really like a lot of Japanese literature. I am reading a lot of Mieko Kawakami. The course also looks really good, too.”
He added: “I am excited for what’s to come, and I have to work hard to get it.”
Ben has also said it is his long-term goal to help others publish their own books through Frozen Moon Press.
In terms of shorter-term plans, Ben will also be helping with an event at 9.15 on Friday and Saturday of this week (commencing January 19) where the café will be brewing rare coffee in collaboration with Chill Beans, a London-based coffee company and supplier.
Ben said: “I am really excited about it, the event is with Chill Beans, the coffee we have got is all from Ethiopia and is all wild-grown, and it's really interesting as well because when you see the beans they are all really small but really dense, but they taste really sweet and are super, super interesting."
He added: “It’s an opportunity to try a lot of rarer coffees you wouldn’t be able to, so it is quite an exciting thing, and it introduces speciality coffee, which in the UK is still quite a new concept. It just shows how much variety there is in coffee, and it should be really cool.”
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