Chris Cleave was born in London in 1973, and spent his earliest years in Cameroon, where his dad built the Guinness brewery. In 1991 he wrote a novel called The Roadkill Cookbook and went to Balliol College, Oxford, which he left with a First in Experimental Psychology. After having worked sailing yachts from the south of France to the Eastern Mediterranean for their owners and as a busboy in Melbourne, Australia, he returned to London and spent three years with The Telegraph. In 2000 he met Clémence. They moved to Paris, and he now divides his time between playing with his son Louis and writing a new London-based novel. Incendiary is his first book.
He lives in Surrey with his wife and their son.
