Jan Arriens was born in England in 1943 to Dutch parents, and grew up in New Zealand and Australia. He spent ten years as a diplomat in the Australian foreign service, and has worked as a freelance translator since 1978. In 1987 he founded the death row correspondence organisation LifeLines after seeing a BBC TV documentary, and in that year he also became a Quaker. He is a member of Cambridge Hartington Grove meeting. He delivered the Henry Cadbury Memorial Lecture at Friends General Conference Gathering in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1996. His other books are The Knight and the Candle Flame (2000), a retelling of an ancient legend, and Seeking the Source (2005), a collection of stories set in a mythical Indian town