Warwick Cairns was born in Dagenham in 1962. He studied English and Psychology at Keele, and then a few years later took a postgraduate degree in English Literature at Yale under the brilliant but eccentric Professor Harold Bloom. He has worked shifting boxes in a warehouse, and lending money to people in a bank, before writing letters to the people asking why they weren't paying the money back, and why they weren't returning his phone calls. He also spent time drilling wells on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota and travelling in Africa with the explorer Wilfred Thesiger - the subject of his third book -before settling on a career in advertising.