Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham in 1958. He was educated at the local grammar school and at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he read English. He is the author of three novels: Paris Trance, The Search and The Colour of Memory; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; a collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes; and five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist, in the US, for a National Book Critics' Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W H Smith Best Travel Book Award), and, most recently, The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography).

He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and in 2006 he received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.