James Crowden was born in Plymouth and brought up on the edge of Dartmoor. After engineering at Bristol University, anthropology at Oxford and the Army, he traveled widely in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan before spending a winter in a remote Himalayan valley called Zangskar.

He returned to the West Country via The Outer Hebrides and Bristol Docks and then worked for twenty years as a shepherd, sheep-shearer, cider maker and forester. He is a poet and many of his books document the working landscape of the Westcountry. He also contributes to BBC Radio 4.