Leon Garfield was born on July 14, 1921, in Brighton, England. After attending grammar school in Brighton, he briefly studied art and then served for five years in the Army Medical Corps. He worked for twenty years in a London hospital as a biochemical technician while establishing himself as a writer.

He now lives in London.

Garfield taught himself to write fiction by imitating authors such as Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Robert The Captain's Watch, 1971 Child O'War: The True Story of a Sailor Boy in Nelson's Navy, 1972 Lucifer Wilkins, 1973 The Golden Shadow, 1973 (written with Edward Blishen) The Sound of Coaches, 1974 The Prisoners of September, 1975 The Apprentices, 1978 Footsteps, 1980 (also published as John Diamond) The Wedding Ghost, 1985 (written with Charles Keeping) The December Rose, 1986 Louis Stevenson. He is usually categorized as a juvenile writer, but prefers to call his books "family novels...