Giles Foden’s debut novel The Last King of Scotland won the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award, and went on to be released as an Oscar-winning film in 2007. Foden was born in Warwickshire but grew up mostly in Africa. He studied English Literature at University, and became Harper-Wood Student in Creative Writing at St John’s College, Cambridge. In 1993 he became assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Between 1996 and 2006 he worked on the books pages of the Guardian. He is author of two other novels — Ladysmith and Zanzibar — and a work of narrative non-fiction, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth. In 2006 he was awarded an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. One of this year’s MAN Booker judges, Foden is currently completing Turbulence, a novel about the weather forecast for D-Day. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at UEA.