Tobias Hill was born in London. In 2003 the TLS nominated him as one of the best young writers in Britain; in 2004 he was selected as one of the country's Next Generation poets and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. His collection of stories, Skin, won the PEN/Macmillan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. The Cryptographer, his third novel was called a supremely elegant and ambiguous thriller in the Sunday Times.