Peter Walker grew up in Christchurch and began his writing career as a journalist in Wellington and then Sydney. He moved to London in 1986 and joined The Independent and later the Independent on Sunday where he was Foreign Editor. He also wrote for the Literary Review, the Financial Times books pages and Granta. He is the author of the historical memoir The Fox Boy (Bloomsbury, 2001), set in Taranaki, and his first novel was The Courier's Tale (Bloomsbury, 2010), set in Italy and the court of Henry VIII.