Melvin Burgess was born on April 25, 1954 in Twickenham, Surrey, in southeastern England to Christopher and Helen Burgess. He did not enjoy school very much and often did not do well. However, he did enjoy writing and reading. His favorite book as a child was Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows. As a teenager he enjoyed fantasy novels, particularly Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels. Other writers who influenced Burgess as a writer are George Orwell and the German poet-dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Though he had some encouragement to write when he was a teenager, Burgess did not consider writing seriously until he was twenty when he started writing fantasy novels and experimenting with different forms. Later, as he thought more carefully about plot, his books improved.

Burgess lived on the streets of central London and Bristol in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s and worked at odd...