Now writing a memoir and studying for a PhD at the University of St Andrews, he lives in Edinburgh and is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, with a son, Jamie, from a previous marriage.

In the Arabesk trilogy, the point of divergence is in 1915, with Woodrow Wilson brokering an earlier peace so that World War I barely expanded outside of the Balkans; the books are set in a liberal Islamic Ottoman North Africa in the 21st century, mainly centring on El Iskandriya (Alexandria).

Referencing Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade — and picaresque in the style of Candide — it tells the semi magic realist tale of an aristocrat prepared to eat anything, and covers the run up to the French Revolution from the early to late 18th century.

[8] It was an NPR Best Book of the Year for 2013[9] 'Foodies and Francophiles alike will relish this debut novel about Jean-Marie d'Aumout, whom we first meet crunching beetles as a starving orphaned son of nobility in 1723...’[9] In January 2015, it was shortlisted for Le Prix Montesquieu.

2021’s Island Reich, the first stand-alone novel written as Jack Grimwood, mixes the story of the fictional safe cracker and conman Bill O’Hagan, with the Battle of France in June 1940, the German occupation of the Channel Islands, the Duke of Windsor’s exile in Portugal and Operation Willi, the supposed Nazi plot to kidnap the duke and return him to the British throne as a puppet monarch.

Grimwood was guest of honour at Novacon in 2003, at Kontext (in Uppsala, Sweden) in 2008, at Eastercon LX (the 60th British National Science Fiction Convention) in 2009, and at Bristolcon in 2014.