James Dunford Wood

In the mid-1990s, after a failed attempt to be a writer and realising he was unemployable except in a very narrow sense, he launched a career as an entrepreneur, creating his own employment. The majority of these businesses have been in publishing: in 1994 he started a new London events magazine called London This Week; in 1999, he founded Travel Intelligence, an online travel writers collective, alongside AA Gill, Philip Marsden and William Dalrymple. And in 2008 he co-founded The Hotel Guru, an online hotel review guide, since when he has written over 1000 travel pieces, both in print and online. All three were successfully sold. His most recent business, Ometria, is in technology and data.

His first novel, Continental with Juice (republished in 2023 as The Spare and the Heir), was published in 2016. A historical comedy, it imagines what would have become of Anthony Hope’s Ruritania (from the The Prisoner of Zenda) in the 21st century. His first history book, The Big Little War, about the Anglo-Iraq War of May 1941, was published in 2023, following which he edited and published To Burma and Back, the series of war diaries on which the book is based. Since then he has written and published the first two novels in a thriller series – The Girl on the Boat, and Hunted. The third, The Cardinal’s Sin, is due to be published in summer 2024. Themes deal with contemporary history and politics, from designer drugs to Middle East terrorism and biotech.

For his next book, he plans to return to an historical theme. James lives and writes in London, and is a founding member of The Authors’ Collective.