He works as a novelist, food writer and translator, and lives in the Galician city of A Coruña (Spain).
Barlow's early books could be described as comic historical; they combine elements of farce, black humour, magical realism and folklore in what critics have described as an unusual mixture.
More recently Barlow has branched out into children's literature and crime fiction.
Barlow's works include: He was the ghost-writer for the Headless Project (2007-2015) of Swedish conceptual artists goldin+senneby, including the novel Headless, a fictionalised account of Barlow’s investigation into an off-shore company based in the Bahamas.
[3] His books have been translated into Italian, Polish, German, Russian, Spanish and Galician.