Adam is an author, academic, and obsessive list-maker, originally from Manchester but currently living in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He has won The Literary Consultancy’s Pen Factor Award and been shortlisted for Penguin WriteNow and the Northbound Book Prize. He’s received funding for his writing from Arts Council England, New Writing North, and the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded him a three-year fellowship to develop Heroin Baby, a memoir about being born to a mother who spent her pregnancy trying to abort him, and about what it costs to spend thirty years pretending that was fine.

His short piece of memoir “Play” was published in Kit de Waal’s Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers (Unbound, 2019).

His books about language and lists – The Correct Order of Biscuits (2020) and The Wheel Is Spinning But the Hamster Is Dead (2023) – were both published by Hachette and developed from a social media following of over 95,000 language enthusiasts. He writes a regular column on international idioms for the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung and has contributed to The Observer and The New European. He’s appeared on BBC Radio, ABC Radio Melbourne, and RTÉ Radio Ireland.

Adam has developed a show about international idioms, An Idiom Abroad, which has sold out venues across the UK. It can be described as a reading, a monologue, and a stand-up performance all smushed into one.

He has an MA (distinction) in Creative Writing from St Mary’s University and a PhD in Creative Writing from Northumbria University, where he specialised in memoir and childhood trauma.