Toby Litt

I was born in Bedford, England, and grew up in Ampthill (Anglo-Saxon for 'anthill').

After university, I lived for a couple of months in Glasgow and a couple of years in Prague - my favourite city. Then I came back to England and worked in Fielders Bookshop in Wimbledon.

By this point I'd written four and a half unpublished novels, so I decided to try something different: short stories and a creative writing course. Malcolm Bradbury, who ran the course, liked my work and put four short stories in an anthology. The girlfriend of Neil Taylor, an editor at Secker & Warburg, who read those four stories in proof, told him he should publish me.

He did, bless him.

My first book, Adventures in Capitalism, was published in 1996. Since then, I have published quite a few other books, and written quite a few more.

I now teach on the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck.

I am writing a comic called Dead Boy Detectives for Vertigo - based on characters created by Neil Gaiman in Sandman (Season of Mists) and expanded upon in The Children's Crusade. A collection of the first five issues, plus another story, is out now. It's called Dead Boy Detectives: Schoolboy Terrors.

You can find me on twitter @tobylitt
I blog at http://www.tobylitt.com
I'm myself on facebook