Colin Cotterill was born in London and trained as a teacher. He worked as a physical education instructor in Israel, a primary school teacher in Australia, a counsellor for educationally handicapped adults in the United States, and a university lecturer in Japan. More recently he has taught and trained teachers in Thailand and on the Burmese border. He spent several years in Laos, initially with
UNESCO, and wrote and produced a forty-programme language teaching series,
English By Accident, for Thai national television. Cotterill also became involved in child protection in the region and set up an NGO in Phuket, which he ran for the first two years. After two more years studying child abuse and one more stint in Phuket, he moved on to
ECPAT, an international organisation combating
child prostitution and pornography, and established their training programme for caregivers. During this time Cotterill contributed regular columns to the
Bangkok Post. Cotterill set up the Books for Laos project to send books to Lao children and sponsor trainee teachers. Books for Laos receives support from fans of the books and is administered on a voluntary basis. He has also been involved in
Big Brother Mouse, a not-for-profit publishing project in Laos founded by
Sasha Alyson. Cotterill's first novel,
The Night Bastard, was published by Suk's Editions in 2000. The positive reaction prompted him to become a full-time writer. His subsequent books include
Evil in the Land Without (2003),
Pool and Its Role in Asian Communism (2005), ''The Coroner's Lunch
(2004), Thirty-Three Teeth
(2005), Disco for the Departed
(2006), Anarchy and Old Dogs
(2007), Curse of the Pogo Stick
(2008), The Merry Misogynist
(2009), Love Songs from a Shallow Grave
(2010), and Slash and Burn'' (2011). In 2009 Cotterill received the
Crime Writers' Association "
Dagger in the Library" award as "the author of crime fiction whose work is currently giving the greatest enjoyment to library users". Since 1990 Cotterill has been a regular cartoonist for national publications in Thailand. A Thai-language translation of his cartoon scrapbook
Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket was published by Matichon in 2004. On 4 April 2004 he launched an illustrated bilingual column,
Cycle Logical, in the news magazine
Matichon Weekly. Some of these columns have since been collected in a book. ==Awards==