James grew up in Wagga Wagga, and has lived in Sydney, London & has a deep affection for Zimbabwe, where he worked on projects for many years. He currently works in a public health role in a city hospital.

He began to write his first novel Notes from Birds as a young father, finishing it thirty years later when his life resembled the novel more than he had plotted. He hopes it might be regarded as ‘the great novel of Wagga Wagga’. He is working on a second novel, The Licorice Farm. TLF is set further west and a little nudge south, and is trying to find a way to tell a satisfying love story among unusual surveillance practices, crop-dusting, the new nationalism and the politics of irrigation quotas.

James has published in New Writing. He is working towards a collection of poetry tentatively titled, Faulty Field Recordings. He is currently exploring semi-approachable forms of the New Sentence from the Language Movement.

He is also currently working on a collection of journalistic articles exploring the under-the-hood experience of the Uber industry - Under Uber. It is ‘a short book that will be long on wonder, whimsy, and industrial rage’. He hopes to explain the workings of this effective monopoly and tarnish its uber-iquitous brand. He is also working on a dictionary entry for a new word that will combine the nouns ubiquitous and iniquitous, if only he can come up with a suitable word.