Charles Cumming was born in Scotland in 1971. Shortly after university, he was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), an experience that inspired his first novel, A Spy by Nature . He has written several bestselling thrillers, including A Foreign Country which won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller and the Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year. He worked on Sky's acclaimed drama The Day of the Jackal and was the screenwriter of the Gerard Butler movie Plane . He lives in London.