Jasper Fforde is a best-selling novelist, author of The Fourth Bear, The Big Over Easy and the highly-successful Thursday Next series.

Jasper began his career in the film industry, and for twenty years held a variety of posts on such movies as Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment.

Secretly harbouring a desire to tell his own stories rather than help other people tell theirs, Jasper started writing in 1990, and within ten years of enjoyable hobbying and as he calls it 'learning by trial and error' (receiving 76 rejection letters in the process), finally came up with a novel - his seventh - that was deemed publishable. The Eyre Affair was a massive success both in the UK and the US, entering the New York Times Bestseller List in its first week of publication in the US.

Jasper followed this up with one book each year from 2001 until 2007, and is getting ready for the release of two more in 2010.