About

Daniel Tammet was born in 1979, and grew up in East London. He was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy as a child, and with autism and synaesthesia as a young adult, and his neurodivergence has profoundly shaped his life and work. Having always felt like an outsider in his native country and language, he spent a gap year in Lithuania and later emigrated to France. He holds a First Class Honours degree in the humanities from the Open University and has worked as a full-time writer since 2005.

His books of memoir, essays, creative nonfiction and poetry explore perception and cognition while narrating the neurodivergent experience. The autobiographical Born On A Blue Day (2006) delves into his synaesthesia, a blending of the senses, which allows him to process abstract information in tangible forms: words appear to him as colours and textures, numbers as shapes and personalities. In Thinking in Numbers (2012) he devotes a chapter to the poetry he sees in the mathematical constant Pi (3.14…) which he recited from memory to 22,514 decimal places at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford on March 14 2004. He is the subject of several peer-reviewed scientific papers, the BAFTA-nominated TV documentary, The Boy with the Incredible Brain, the BBC Radio 4 documentary, Two Poets (alongside Les Murray), and the Kate Bush song, Pi.

If Tammet’s writing is deeply informed by personal experience it ranges far beyond it to depict the mental states of others, from a Soviet grandmaster (in Mishenka, 2016) and a supercentenarian Frenchwoman (in Portraits, 2018) to an autistic Japanese woman’s research into the psychology of loneliness (in Nine Minds, 2024).

Tammet’s work has taken him across North and Central America, the UK and Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and is studied in English, literature and psychology departments in schools and universities in many countries. His books have been translated into thirty languages and won numerous distinctions and the plaudits of authors as diverse as J. M. Coetzee, Oliver Sacks, Amy Tan, Emma Donoghue, Billy Collins, Temple Grandin, Lydia Davis, Andrew Solomon, Graeme Simsion, Rosa Montero, David Eagleman, Kurt Andersen, John Elder Robison and Brad Leithauser.