James Ward lives and works in southern England and has been married for over forty years. He has two grown-up boys. His hobbies include walking with his dog in the countryside, visiting charity shops, and reading. He writes fiction, philosophy and poetry, and publishes under the "Cool Millennium Books" imprint (which he hopes one day to broaden to include other authors, and which has its own website). He has over 40,000 followers on TikTok, where he regularly posts videos about serious literature. He can also be found on YouTube.

His most ambitious project, the Tales of MI7 series, was written between 2010 and 2020. It consists of eighteen self-contained novels, set in contemporary London and linked by characters and timeline. It was never intended to be a "series" in the sense of a continuous narrative across different volumes; rather, readers can enjoy any one book without having read the others. All examine the major political, social, international and moral concerns of the second decade of the 21st century. Each individual volume - with the exception of Our Woman in Jamaica - was written contemporaneously with the year in which it was set.

Beginning in 2025 with Firearms & the Fortress, he intends to re-focus his energies on producing philosophical texts intended to throw light on the contemporary world (His 21st Century Philosophy and A New Theory of Justice were both produced over a decade ago). He has an MA and a DPhil in Philosophy, both from the University of Sussex.