Giles Foden was born in in 1967 to Irish and English parents. He grew up mostly in Africa, spending his summer holidays in north Kerry. Between 1990 and 2006 he worked on newspapers and magazines in Britain, during which period he published his debut novel The Last King of Scotland, which won the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award. He is author of three other novels — Ladysmith, Zanzibar and Turbulence — and a work of narrative non-fiction, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth. Giles is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He has been a judge on the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, and the Dublin IMPAC Prize.

Prof. Foden’s lecture, entitled Perspective, Place and Domain in Creative Writing, marks the first gathering of the new interdisciplinary LANDscape Research Cluster at UL taking place that day, as well as forming part of ‘Local’, the Lecture@SAUL Series for Autumn 2014.