Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan, Ontario, and brought up on the Welsh island of Ynys Mon. He has a PhD in literature from King's College, Cambridge and has taught courses on American literature and creative writing at Cambridge, Leipzig, Bangor and Cardiff. He won the Rhys Davies Short Story Award in 2002 and wrote his first novel, The Tower (2004), while spending seven months in a body cast after breaking his back falling off the walls of a castle. Soon after he published Send My Cold Bones Home (2006) and Revenant (2008), all set on Ynys Mon and highly praised in the UK. His most recent novels Eye Lake (2011) and its follow-up, Hummingbird, are set in the northern Ontario town of Crooked River, based on Atikokan, where Hughes spent his childhood summers.

Hughes's short story "Up Here" won an O. Henry Award and was included in the 2018 O. Henry Prize Anthology. Hummingbird was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2018 and won the Edward Stanford Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place

Tristan Hughes teaches Creative Writing at Cardiff University and splits his time between Cardiff and Atikokan.