Iain Bamforth grew up in Glasgow where he studied at the city’s medical school. He has since combined medical practice and writing, being awarded a Scottish Arts Council writers’ bursary in the year he graduated. His medical training has included periods in places as disparate as the American Hospital of Paris and Broken Hill Base Hospital in outback Australia. After settling in Strasbourg in 1995, he worked as a solo family doctor before becoming a freelance health and development consultant in several countries, mostly in South-East Asia.

His writing interests include poetry and essays on a variety of topics from the medicine and the arts, language and philosophy, European culture and the wider history of ideas. Articles and commentaries have appeared over the years in Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, Quadrant and PN Review.