John Herdman was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1941, went to school there and to university at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he graduated with 1st Class Honours in English and later received his Ph.D. Thereafter he returned to Scotland and during the late 1960s and 1970s was much involved in Scottish nationalism, both political and literary, a period recalled in his memoir "Poets, Pubs, Polls and Pillar Boxes" (1999).

John Herdman is a novelist, short story writer, playwright and critic and has published 13 books. He has had two plays successfully produced on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in 1985 and 1997. He has held a Creative Writing Fellowship at Edinburgh University, Hawthornden Writer's Fellowships (twice), and the William Soutar Fellowship in Perth, and has been Writer in Residence at Champlain College, Trent University, Canada. He has received Scottish Arts Council Awards for his novels Pagan's Pilgrimage and Imelda, and four Scottish Arts Council Bursaries. His work has been taught at universities in France, Australia and Russia.

Herdman's principal books of fiction are the early novellas and stories now collected in Four Tales; Imelda and Other Stories; Ghostwriting and The Sinister Cabaret. He has been described as "a worthy successor to James Hogg and R L Stevenson" within the field of Scottish fiction, but his main affinities are perhaps with European writers of the nineteenth century and with the Irish and European modernists. His fictions have a metaphysical flavour and are salted with liberal dashes of the satirical and the grotesque. He has a particular obsession with the theme of duality and has published a critical study of the motif of the Double in nineteenth century fiction. He has also written a pioneering study of the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Voice Without Restraint, and to demonstrate his eclecticism has edited two volumes of The Third Statistical Account of Scotland.

John Herdman is married and lives in Highland Perthshire.