Giles Foden was born in in 1967 and grew up mostly in Africa. He was Harper-Wood Student in Creative Writing at St John's College, Cambridge 1989-90. In 1993 he became assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Between 1996 and 2006 he worked on the books pages of the Guardian, during which period he published his debut novel The Last King of Scotland, which won the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award and was later made into an Oscar-winning film. He is author of two other novels set in Africa - Ladysmith and Zanzibar - and a work of non-fiction, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth. In 2007 Foden was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.