Born in 1959, Jonathan Charley, studied architecture in Portsmouth, London and Moscow, and subsequently worked in community architecture for seven years, completing his PhD in 1994. He has lived in Glasgow for nearly twenty-five years, is currently Director of Cultural Studies in the Department of Architecture at the University of Strathclyde, and has been a lecturer and tutor across the world from Moscow, to Berlin, London, Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte. In 2012 he was appointed as the Project Director for Scotland at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. Alongside exhibitions and media projects, he writes mainly about the political and social history of architecture and cities, most recently Memories of Cities: Trips and Manifestos (2013), and the co-edited Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture and Modernity (2011). He is currently writing a new book The Monologues of City X that takes the reader on a journey into the heart of the capitalist city through four fictional narratives, capital, machine, nature and utopia, and is editing a Research Companion for Ashgate Publishers on the complex and diverse relationships between Architecture and Literature. He has a wife, two daughters, speaks good Portuguese, adequate Russian and poor French, and has a life long passion for whisky, fish, dub-reggae and Plymouth Argyle Football Club