Derek Byrne was born in London. He has studied fiction-writing with the University of East Anglia, Curtis Brown and the Faber Academy.  Pretty Boy Red is his first novel.

Under his real name, Paul Baird, he is an academic specialising in quantum information theory. He has degrees from Warwick and Oxford, and has held posts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Australia. He is currently emeritus professor at the University of Western Brittany in France.

He lives on the northwest coast of Brittany.