James Hamilton-Paterson was born on November 6, 1941 in London, England. He was educated at Windlesham House, Sussex, Bickley Hall, Kent, King's School, Canterbury, and Exeter College, Oxford.

Serving as a hospital orderly at St. Stephen's Hospital between 1966—1968, Paterson earned his first break in 1969 as a reporter for New Statesman until 1974 when he became features editor for Nova magazine.

Hamilton-Paterson is generally known as a commentator on the Philippines, where he has lived on and off since 1979. His novel Ghosts of Manila (1994) portrayed the Philippine capital in all its decay and violence and was highly critical of the Marcoses - a view he rescinded with the publication of America's Boy (1998), which sets the Marcos regime into the geopolitical context of the time.

In 1989, Gerontius was published, a reconstruction of a journey made by the composer Sir Edward Elgar along the River Amazon in 1923. Regarded by admirers as being among the best British novels of the 1980s, its poetic language, dreamlike landscapes and lush imaginings won him the Whitbread Award for first novel.

In 1992, he published Seven-Tenths,a far-ranging meditation upon the sea and its meanings. A mixture of art, science, history and philosophy, this book is a deep, abstract lament on loss and the loss of meaning.

In 2000, he returned to the magazine industry as a science columnist for Das Magazin (Zurich) for two years before becoming a science columnist for Die Weltwoche.

Poetry

• Option Three (1974)
• Dutch Alps (1984)

Fiction

• The View from Mount Dog (1987)
• Gerontius (1989)
• The Bell Boy (1990)
• Griefwork (1993)
• Ghosts of Manila (1994)
• The Music (1995)
• Loving Monsters (2002)
• Cooking with Fernet Branca (2004)
• Amazing Disgrace (2006)
• Rancid Pansies (2008)

Children's fiction

• Flight Underground (1969)
• The House in the Waves (1970)
• Hostage (1978)

Non-fiction

• A very personal war: the story of Cornelius Hawkridge (1971)
• Mummies: Life and Death in ancient Egypt (1978)
• Playing with Water (1987)
• Three Miles Down (1990)
• Seven-Tenths: the sea and its thresholds (1992)
• America's Boy (1998)