Jonathan Neale was born in New York, grew up in India and Texas, and lives in England. He has written three nonfiction books, three novels, and eleven plays. Neale has done anthropological field research with nomads in Afghanistan, sailed the Atlantic in a small boat, worked for several years as an AIDS counselor, written a Ph.D. thesis on naval mutinies in eighteenth-century Britain, and was part of the organizing committee for the protests against the G8 in Genoa in 2001. "Tigers of the Snow" book grew out of his love for trekking in the Himalayas.