Cheryl Follon was born in Ayrshire, where she grew up. She studied Law and then English and Scottish Literature at Glasgow University before taking an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, and now teaches at a college of further education in Glasgow. She has received two writer's bursaries from the Scottish Arts Council, and has published three collections with Bloodaxe, All Your Talk (2004), Dirty Looks (2010) and Santiago (2017). Her essay on the Mojave Desert was shortlisted for the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing in 2012.