Iain Bamforth was born in 1959 and grew up in Glasgow. He has worked as a hospital doctor in the American Hospital of Paris and the Australian outback, as urban and rural general practitioner, and more recently on community health projects in south-east Asia. He has also been a scientific translator and editor, literary journalist, and lecturer in comparative literature. He has published five collections of poetry, a history of modern medicine as told through literature (The Body in the Library, Verso), and a collection of essays on European intellectual history (The Good European, Carcanet).