Dr Nick Lowe

was born in Manchester, grew up in Glasgow, and read Classics at Cambridge, where he did his PhD on Greek religion under Geoffrey Kirk. Having survived the demise of classics in three other London colleges, he is Reader in Classical Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is a broad Greek and Latin literary specialist with particular interests in comedy, prose fiction, narrative generally, and the interface between literary theory and cognitive science. Books include The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative (2000) and Comedy (2008), and he is currently trying to see off a big project on the classical Greek world in historical fiction. He pops up sporadically on television and radio, including a handful of appearances on In Our Time, and even more sporadically manages to deliver something to the TLS. Among other lives, he has been reviewing films for Interzone for 25 years; a 400,000-word anniversary collection is threatened for 2010. He is married with two daughters and lives in the dodgiest bit of Hampstead, where neighbours cover their ears in delight at his mastery of palm-wine guitar. He is no relation to anyone talented.