John Barlow

John Barlow; Author, Academic, Ghostwriter and Translator

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

Born in West Yorkshire, he worked as a cabaret musician before reading English Literature at Cambridge, followed by a PhD in Applied Linguistics at Hull University. He lectured at York University before moving to Spain, where he worked for twenty years as a writer, ghostwriter and translator.

His first published work, the novella ‘Eating Mammals’, won the Paris Review Discovery Prize (New York), and his culinary travelogue Everything But The Squeal was a finalist in the Cordon Bleu World Food Writing Awards. More recently, he has published the John Ray and Joe Romano crime series, the latter for HQ/HarperCollins.

He has also 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.

Between 2008 and 2015 John was the writer for Headless, an experimental project by the conceptual artists Goldin+Senneby. His work on the project has been published in English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Portuguese, and has featured in numerous art shows and galleries globally. The novel Headless, based on the project, was released in 2016 (Triple Canopy/Sternberg), and features John Barlow as the main character.

Finally, under the pen name Kit Mustow he writes the Brenna Martin Crime Thrillers, a mass-market crime fiction series set in London, where he currently lives.