Warwick Cairns was born in 1962 and grew up in Dagenham, in Essex. He studied English and Psychology at Keele, and then a few years later he took a postgraduate degree in English Literature at Yale under the brilliant but eccentric Professor Harold Bloom. He spent time drilling wells on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota and travelling in Africa with the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, before settling on a career in advertising. He lives in Windsor with his wife Susan and his daughters Alice and Lucy. His first book, About the Size of It was published in 2007, and his second, How to Live Dangerously, in 2008