Author Profile
GILES FODEN
Please note that Giles Foden has cancelled his appearance at the festival.
 GILES FODEN was
born in Warwickshire in 1967. His family moved to Malawi in 1972 where
he was brought up. He returned to England at the age of 13 and was
educated at Malvern College and Cambridge University where he read
English.
He worked as a journalist for Media Week magazine and became an
assistant editor on the Times
Literary Supplement, then deputy literary editor of The Guardian. He contributes
regularly to The Guardian and
is books review editor for Condé
Nast Traveller magazine.
His first novel, the acclaimed The
Last King of Scotland (1998), is set during Idi Amin's rule of
Uganda in the 1970s and won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset
Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Memorial
Prize. The
film of The Last King of Scotland has been nominated for an Oscar
and will be screened at the Franschhoek Literary Festival.
His second novel, Ladysmith
(1999), is set during the Anglo-Boer War in 1899 and tells the story of
a young woman, Bella Kiernan, who becomes caught up in the siege of
Ladysmith. The book was inspired by letters written by Foden's
great-grandfather, Arthur Foden, a British soldier in the Imperial
Yeomanry in South Africa during the conflict.
Giles Foden's journalism is included in The Guardian Century (1999), a
collection of the best reportage and feature-writing published in the
newspaper during the twentieth century, and he contributed a short
story to The Weekenders, a
collection of short fiction set in Africa by various contemporary
writers. His last novel, Zanzibar (2002),
is set in East Africa and explores the events surrounding the bombings
of American embassies in 1998. A new book, The Battle for Lake Tanganyika, was
published in 2004.
Photo credit ©
Poppy Pix
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