Robert Carver was brought up in Cyprus, Turkey and India. Educated at the Scuola Medici, Florence, and Durham University, where he read Oriental Studies and Politics, he taught English in a maximum security gaol in Australia and worked as a BBC World Service reporter in Eastern Europe and the Levant. Four of his plays have been broadcast by the BBC. He has written for the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph and other papers and is the author of The Accursed Mountains (Flamingo 1999)