James Scudamore was born in 1976 and spent much of his childhood living abroad. After graduating with a degree in Modern Languages from Oxford University, he spent four years working in advertising, before taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University Of East Anglia. His first novel, The Amnesia Clinic, was published in 2006. It won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Glen Dimplex Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. He lives in London.