Will Cohu was born in Guisborough, North Yorkshire in 1964, the middle of five children of a peripatetic RAF family. His mother's family were farmers and builders from Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire: his father's family came from Guernsey. He was sent to Barnard Castle School and later read English at Exeter College, Oxford. He worked as a theatre administrator and director and from 1992 began writing full time. He was a regular contributor to The Daily Telegraph, writing obituaries and the Urban Dog and Parker columns, in which he used the eyes and nose of his Scottish Terrier, Parker, to chronicle city and country life. In 2000 he moved to Lincolnshire after the birth of his first daughter, where he had a smallholding. His books include Urban Dog (2001), Out Of The Woods (2007) and most recently The Wolf Pit: A Moorland Romance (2012). The latter uses a biographical quest into his family to explore the relationship between people and landscape. It took three years to write, and and was completed with the assistance of a grant from The Royal Literary Fund. He is currently writing a novel, Nothing But Grass, set in Lincolnshire and due to be published by Chatto & Windus in 2013. Cohu has been shortlisted twice for the Sunday Times/EFG Private Bank Award, the largest prize in the world for short fiction. This year he was long-listed for Two Bad Thumbs, a story written entirely as text messages. He loves trees, especially those lonely and much abused ones in the street than no-one notices until they are gone, hills, rivers, digging, building, planting, cricket, his three children, the poems of Wallace Stevens, the diaries of Antonia White, The Master And Margarita, the nature writing of Richard Mabey, and Brendon Chase, the 1942 Carnegie-winning boys adventure story by Denys Watkins Pitchford. He lives in Lincoln.
