John Lanchester was born in Hamburg, grew up in Hong Kong, and lives in London. He has written six works of fiction and four of non-fiction. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the E. M. Forster Award and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into twenty-five languages. The television mini-series of his novel Capital won an International Emmy Award. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.