I was born, raised and educated in Edinburgh, Scotland, spent a year travelling and teaching music at a school in New Zealand, then went to Oxford University to study for a BA in English language & literature. During these three years I read lots of book, played lots of guitar as part of a folk trio, and performed regular comedy shows – I was president and director of the Oxford Revue (the sketch comedy group founded by Michael Palin in the 1950s which went on to foster talents such as Python’s Terry Jones, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, Armando Iannucci and Ian Hislop), and was also a founding member of the Oxford Imps, an improvised comedy group. After graduating in 2005 I was awarded a scholarship to study Japanese language & history at Daichi Keizai (literally ‘number one economics’) university in Fukuoka, Japan. I returned to the UK a year later and moved to London to pursue a career in publishing. I worked across three different imprints of Random House over the course of five years, editing and publishing authors such as V.S Ramachandran, John Barrow, A. J. Jacobs and Yasmina Khadra. I then moved to Sceptre to become Editorial Director in August 2011, where I currently acquire, edit and publish literary fiction and non-fiction, including Ned Beauman, Kevin Powers and Rolf Dobelli. Sceptre also published my first book, a collection of humorous typos, in October 2012, which was chosen by the Guardian as one of their books of the year. A revised, updated American edition will be published in July 2014 by Three Rivers Press.