Iain Bamforth grew up in Glasgow and graduated from its medical school. He has pursued a peripatetic career as a hospital doctor, general practitioner, translator, lecturer in comparative literature, and latterly public health consultant in several developing countries, principally in Asia. His prose includes The Body in the Library (Verso, 2003), an account of modern medicine as told through literature; and The Good European (2006), a collection of writings on ideas and literature in European history. He is currently working on a collection of aphoristic, fantastic and philosophical stories about medicine conjointly with a book of impressions of Wallacea — the biogeographical name for the various archipelagos between Asia and Australia. Several of his wide-ranging essays and reviews can be read on his website. His fifth poetry collection is published by Carcanet Press in 2012.