Giles Foden was born in 1967 and spent much of his early life in Africa. He was educated at Cambridge University, where he won the TR Henn and Harper Wood prizes in creative writing, rowed for his college, and represented the university against Oxford in pole-vaulting. He has worked as a barman, a builder, a journalist, an academic, and as arapporteurfor the European Commission. For ten years, he was an editor and writer on theTimes Literary Supplementand theGuardian, and his writing has since been published inGranta,Vogue,Esquire,The New York TimesandConde Nast Traveller, where he remains a contributing editor. His fiction includes THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, LADYSMITH, ZANZIBAR and TURBULENCE – works which, according to Alan Massie writing in theScotsman, ‘establish him as the most original and interesting novelist of his generation’.
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask prize and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Award; it was made into an Oscarwinning feature film in 2006, starring Forest Whitaker, James McEvoy and Gillian Anderson. His non-fiction book, MIMI AND TOUTOU GO FORTH, which describes a bizarre naval battle on Lake Tanganyika in 1915 between British and German warships, was published to great acclaim in the autumn of 2004 and was a Radio 4 Book of the Week. Currently a professor in the creative writing department of the University of East Anglia, and an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Giles also works as a consultant for the Miles Morland Foundation, a charity that supports emergent African writers.
