John Birmingham was born in Liverpool, England during the worst days of Beatlemania. Researchers have worked for many years to link the two events. He grew up in Australia and began writing as a way of avoiding office life when his study options ran out. For ten years he freelanced, taking feature commissions from a wide variety of magazines such as Playboy, Rolling Stone and the Long Bay Prison News. His first book, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, was a cult comedy success which nobody really saw coming. Especially not John or his publishers. Felafel went on to be filmed by indie auteur Richard Lownstein and was adapted for the stage by a group of unemployed actors after they filled Birmingham full of strong ale and made him sign over the theatrical rights on the back of a soggy beer mat. The stage play became the longest running non muscial production in Australian history.

To escape the gravitational pull of Felafel, Birmingham wrote Leviathan, the unauthorised biograhy of Sydney, (Random House) which won the National Award for Nonfiction in 2002.

He then switched to writing alternate history technothrillers, starting with Weapons of Choice in 2004 because the genre amused and entertained him a lot more than straight history.

He is working on a new series of thrillers for Del Rey/Pan Macmillan due for publication in late 2008 and continues to file regular copy as a full time columnist and essay writer.