Giles Foden

Giles Foden spent much of his early life in Africa. He was educated at Cambridge University, where he won the TR Henn and Harper Wood prizes in creative writing. He first worked as a journalist for Media Week magazine, he was an editor and writer on the Times Literary Supplement and then the Guardian, where he was deputy literary editor. His writing has since been published in Granta, Vogue, Esquire, The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveller, where he remains a contributing editor. His fiction includes Ladysmith, Zanzibar, Turbulence and The Last King of Scotland, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask prize and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Award and was made into an Oscar winning feature film in 2006. Currently a professor in the creative writing department of the University of East Anglia, and an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Giles also works as a consultant for the Miles Morland Foundation, a charity that supports emergent African writers