Barry Shelby was born in 1960 in Berkeley, California, where he later attended the University of California.  He received a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Illinois in 1984, after which he was an editor at World Press Review magazine in Manhattan.  He moved to Scotland in 1997, where he has worked as a caretaker for a small and privately-owned castle on the Clyde Coast, as a "temp" with the privatized national railway company, and as a food and drink writer and editor for newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, Glasgow Herald, and The List.  He is married to a Scot and lives in Glasgow.