Author Jasper Fforde was born on January 11, 1961 in London, England. He spent numerous years as a focus puller in the film industry, where he worked on films such as Quills, Golden Eye, and Entrapment. His first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. He is the author of the Thursday Next, Nursery Crime and Dragonslayer series and the novel Shades of Gray. In 2004, he won the Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction for The Well of Lost Plots. In 2013, his title The Last Dragonslayer made The New York Times best seller list.