Richard Beard is a novelist and sports writer. He studied at Cambridge, then went on to work in Hong Kong and at the Dragon School in Oxford as a games teacher. After a spell as a private secretary to Mathilda, Duchess of Argyll, he moved to Paris where he worked at the National Library, while continuing his studies with the Open University. In 1994 he enrolled for Malcolm Bradbury’s Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, followed by two years in Geneva.

In 1998 Beard and his family moved to a house in the Mendip Hills owned by the Royal Society of Literature. After six years in Somerset, near Midsomer Norton and then Wells, he went to Japan in 2003 as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo.

He is the author of four novels and two non-fiction works.