Benjamin Wood is a British author and university lecturer. Born in 1981, Wood grew up in Southport, England, and initially pursued a career in music before attending the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, where he studied screenwriting, filmmaking, and photography. He built on this experience by pursuing a Commonwealth Scholarship, which allowed him to attend the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. There, he completed his master’s in fine arts in creative writing. Wood went on to work as a lecturer at the Birkbeck University of London, where he cofounded the school’s creative writing program for undergraduate students. In 2016, he moved to King’s College London and founded the fiction writing program, serving as a senior lecturer.

Wood is a critically celebrated novelist. His first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was awarded the Prix du Roman Fnac as well as the Prix Baudelaire. His other works include The Young Accomplice, A Station on the Path to Somewhere, and The Ecliptic. His novels have been nominated for numerous literary prizes, with Seascraper being long-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize.

In interviews to promote Seascraper, Wood has explained how he drew on his personal experiences to inform the setting and characters. He has credited his childhood in Southport, a town in northwest England, with helping him develop the fictional town of Longferry, which is similarly located. Both towns have expansive beaches and a long history of locals working at sea. Wood told The Booker Prizes: 

In Southport, the coastal town where I grew up in northwest England, the sea is quite elusive […] An industry of shrimpers used to thrive there, and I always sensed there was a story for me to tell about the region’s past some day, connecting it with my own experiences of growing up. Longferry is crafted to a smaller scale than my hometown, but the story of Seascraper was built from my lasting memories of Southport beach (“Benjamin Wood Interview,” The Booker Prizes, 2026). 

The influence of Wood’s own background as a singer-songwriter is evident in the character of Thomas Flett, a shrimp fisherman with unfulfilled dreams of making music. Before becoming a novelist, Wood tried to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter but changed his mind when he did not secure a record deal. He explained to Bookanista, “I left school in the middle of my A-Levels to become a full-time musician chasing record deals, and I got very close with that life but it didn’t quite fall into place […]” (Scholes, Lucy. “Benjamin Wood by Extension.” Bookanista, 2026). While Wood never became a professional musician, making music is still an important part of his creative process that he credits for helping his writing work. He told interviewer Sally Whitehill, “The process isn’t the same as fiction writing: it challenges me in different ways. Sitting with a guitar or at a piano, trying to draw out a chord sequence, a vocal melody, an arrangement—there’s something uniquely therapeutic about that as a creative practice” (“Interview with Benjamin Wood.” Sally Whitehill, 2026).