Michael Pearce grew up in the (then) Anglo-Egyptian Sudan among the various tensions he draws on for his award-winning Mamur Zapt series. He returned there to teach, and retains a human rights interest in the area. In between whiles his career has followed the standard academic rake’s progress from teaching to writing to editing to administration. He finds international politics a pallid imitation of academic ones. He lives in London. He is now a full-time writer. He was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Last Laugh Award for funniest crime novel of the year for the ‘Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt’. Michael Pearce is also the author of the crime novels featuring Dmitri Kameron, set in Tsarist Russia of the 1890s.