Campbell Armstrong was born in Glasgow in 1944. He was awarded his BA degree from the University of Sussex. Three years after his first novel was published in 1968, he moved to the United States, where he taught creative writing. He lived there for twenty years with his wife and children, and produced twenty novels before moving to Ireland in 1991. Following the international success of Jig (1987), many of his books, including Brainfire and Asterisk, are once again available in the United Kingdom.