Alan Warner is a Scottish author born in Connel near Oban on the west coast of Scotland. He grew up in a working class family without books. When he was fifteen, he came into contact with the novels of Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, Charles Webb and others. It was a life-changing experience. He began to read the great classics and he secretly dreamed of becoming an author. He left school at the age of sixteen to work on the railway. When he was twenty he read poetry and went to night school. He took a degree in London and attended the University of Glasgow for a year. He was thirty-one years old and working as a train driver for British Rail in Edinburgh by the time his first novel was published in 1995. He immediately left his job and has been a full-time writer ever since.