'One of my favourite of all contemporary writers. I love his sense of the absurd, his pessimism mixed with robust good cheer, his beautifully crafted sentences, his jokes and his intelligence.' Alain de Botton

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as seven other non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a National Book Critic's Circle Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Circle of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was given GQ's 'Writer of the Year' Award. He lives in London.