Piers Moore Ede was born in 1975 and educated at Winchester College, the University of Exeter, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His first book, Honey and Dust — a global search for wild honey hunters — won the non-fiction category of the DH Lawrence Prize and was nominated for the Jeremy Round First Book Award with the British Guild of Food Writers. In Kaleidoscope City he draws on a year spent living in Varanasi to write a memoir of the city's sacred geography, its contradictions of life and death, and its diverse inhabitants.