Brian Ruckley was born and brought up in Edinburgh. After studying at Edinburgh and Stirling Universities, and after a good deal of displacement activity (varying from spending three months in the rainforests of Borneo trying to record the dawn chorus of gibbons to briefly working in a tea warehouse / factory), he moved to England to enter the world of full-time employment. Writing was a big feature of his childhood, and has ebbed and flowed as a spare-time occupation ever since. He sold a couple of short stories in the 1990s, but didn't really start thinking seriously about writing novels until the 21st Century had got underway. At the start of 2003, he turned himself into a freelance consultant on environmental projects, partly in order to devote more time to writing; since then, the writing side of things has taken over almost completely. He is now back in Edinburgh, where he lives with his lovely wife, and miss the excitement of London only a little, and only occasionally.