John Lennard (born 1964) read English at New College, Oxford, took an MA at Washington University in St Louis, and a DPhil. back at New College. After teaching for the Open University and the University of London, he was Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, from 1991-8, and Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, from 2004-09. He is now an Associate Member and Director of Studies in English at Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and a freelance writer as well as the general editor of Humanities-Ebooks' Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series.

Besides almost all books, he likes cats, cricket, mountains and forests, architecture, punctuation (and its peculiar history), red wine, honky-tonk piano, blues and folk, rugs, knots, jigsaws, crosswords, pottery, Golden Age Dutch fine art, and astronomy.