DBC Pierre was born in 1961 in Reynella, Australia. He was brought up in Mexico and the UK, and now lives in County Leitrim, Ireland. He worked previously as a designer and an internationally published cartoonist and burst onto the literary stage with his debut novel Vernon God Little, a dark satire set in the aftermath of a Texas high school massacre published in 2003. It won the MAN Booker Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Ludmila’s Broken English, his second, was published in 2006. His most recent book is Petit Mal a collection of writing that was published by Faber in 2013.