John's fiction and non-fiction has been published by HarperCollins/ William Morrow, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 4th Estate and various others in the UK, US, Australia, Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.

The Joe Romano series, featuring Leeds-based detective Joe Romano, is published by HQ/HarperCollins.

John was born in the village of Gomersal, West Yorkshire, England, in 1967. After leaving school he worked as a cabaret musician for several years, then read English Literature at Cambridge University, followed by postgraduate research into Language Acquisition at Hull University. He worked as a university teacher until 2004, then moved to the Galician city of A Coruna.

Apart from writing fiction, he has also worked as a ghost writer, journalist and translator. He has written for the Washington Post, Slate.com, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Penthouse, Departures Magazine and The Big Issue, and was a feature writer for the award-winning food magazine Spain Gourmetour. He also works as an academic translator and proofreader (see here).

John's first published work, the novella ‘Eating Mammals’, won the Paris Review's Discovery (Plimpton) Prize in 2002. He went on to publish a collection of novellas, EATING MAMMALS, the historical novel INTOXICATED, and EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL, a food-travelogue about northern Spain. He then published the off-beat noir novel WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO JERRY PICCO? and three books in the JOHN RAY/LS9 crime series. His mostv recent series features Leeds-based detective JOE ROMANO.

John has also worked with the conceptual artists Goldin+Senneby on the HEADLESS project, which took him to Nassau, Bergamo, Oslo, Paris and London, and into the company of Bahamian off-shore bankers, defamation layers, artists, and Martina Navratilova. His writing for the project has been published variously in English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Portuguese, and has featured in numerous art shows and galleries around the world. The novel HEADLESS, based on the project, was released in 2016 (Triple Canopy/Sternberg), and features John Barlow as the main character.