Tom Cox was born in Nottingham in 1975, and then again, in the same place, in 1988, after watching the US Masters golf championship on television. For the following five years, he proceeded to crap up his exam results by spending every waking hour thinking about his backswing, eventually reaching a handicap of two and getting suspended from his home club for hitting a ball very gently into someone's trolley.

In 1992, after golf had stopped interfering with his education, music took over, as Tom began to write his
own underground fanzine, Words I Might Have Ate, in the process gaining the respect of an assortment of Radio One Disc Jockeys, music press editors and indie rock sociopaths. As a result of this, he was briefly employed by the New Musical Express, until 1997, when he finally got tired of ending every review with the phrase "Which was nice!".

From 1997 until 2000, Tom wrote about pop music for The Guardian, becoming the paper's Rock Critic in 1999. Since then, his writing has appeared in The Sunday Times, The Times, Esquire, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, Uncut, Mojo, The Mail On Sunday, Word, Jack and Golf International, and on Radio Four's Front Row.

In 2002, Bantam Press published Nice Jumper, a memoir of his time as a teenage golf rebel. In early 2003 the book was shortlisted for the National Sporting Club/Ladbrokes' Best Newcomer award.

It was followed in August 2003 by Educating Peter (also published by Bantam). Tom's attempt to understand the modern teenage psyche by way of a road trip with a melancholy fourteen year-old Slipknot fan.

Tom's next book, Lost Tribes Of Pop, will be published by Piatkus in October. He lives in Norfolk with his wife and four duplicitous cats.