Philip Dundas grew up adopted, on a farm in rural Scotland. He was expelled from school at seventeen, drifted through a wilderness of drugs, bad luck and borrowed talent, and came out the other side with a ferocious appetite for life and a talent for starting over.
He read English at Oxford and took an MPhil by research at Glasgow. He spent six years as Senior Producer at the BBC, leading the Digital Curriculum team. Before that he had worked the music business — press officer to the London Records artists — until that life ran its course. After the BBC he co-founded PipsDish, a restaurant and community food enterprise in London that fed thousands over five years and took him into a youth offenders’ prison in Belfast to cook.
His food blog, launched in 2007, was nominated for a Guild of Food Writers Award. Cooking Without Recipes was published by Little Brown in 2011. His novel Daniel, at Sea was published by Backlash Press in 2020. He has recently completed the script of his first play, Dead & Wounded, currently being developed with a director in New York. He has written on lifestyle and culture for a range of newspapers.
When a BBC programme in 2022 exposed decades of sexual abuse at his Edinburgh school, he came forward, gave evidence at the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, and wrote about it in The Times. He helped bring criminal charges against teachers who had assumed, correctly until then, that silence would hold.
He is now writing Clype.
Daniel, at Sea, published in 2020 and subsequently revised page by page in close collaboration with a Sunday Times bestselling author, remains available for representation.
