Allan Cameron

Allan Cameron was born in 1952, grew up in Nigeria and Bangladesh, and lived as a young adult in Italy. He has written two novels, The Golden Menagerie (Luath Press, 2004), partly based on Apuleius's The Golden Ass but also a polemic against it, and The Berlusconi Bonus (Luath Press, 2005), a political satire principally directed at Western consumerism, the policies of Bush and Blair, and Fukuyama's now disowned victory song of American capitalism. His non-fiction work, In Praise of the Garrulous (2008), is an examination of the essentiality of language to human nature. His two collections of short stories, Can the Gods Cry? and On the Heroism of Mortals, were published in 2011 and 2012.

Over the years, he has translated twenty-four books (including The Anonymous Novel (2016)), and his two collections of poetry, Presbyopia and A Barrel of Dried Leaves, were published in 2009 and 2016. Giving the lie to rumours of a drunken demise shortly after completing a book translation (Cinico: Travels with a Good Professor at the Time of the Scottish Referendum), he continues to live in Glasgow and is reputedly in good health.