Christopher Fox is a composer. He was born in York in 1955, grew up in the north of England and now lives in London. He studied composition with Hugh Wood, Jonathan Harvey and Richard Orton at Liverpool, Southampton and York Universities and was awarded the degree of DPhil in composition from York University in 1984. In 1981 he won the composition prize of the Performing Right Society of Great Britain; since then he has established a reputation as one of the most individual composers of his generation. Between 1984 and 1994 he was a member of the composition staff of the Darmstadt New Music Summer School. During 1987 he lived in West Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berlin Artists Programme. In 1994 he joined the Music Department at the University of Huddersfield, eventually becoming Professor in Composition. Since April 2006 he has been Research Professor in Music at Brunel University.

Fox’s work has been performed and broadcast world-wide and has featured in many of the leading new music festivals, from the Amsterdam PROMS to the BBC Promenade Concerts and from St Petersburg to Sidney. In recent years he has established particularly close relationships with the Ives Ensemble in the Netherlands, for whom he wrote the evening-long ensemble installation, Everything You Need To Know (2000-1) and with Apartment House in the UK. Fox’s music is widely available on CD, with a portrait CD on NMC, four portrait CDs on Metier and other recordings on Artifact, BVHaast and FMR.

His writings on music have also been published widely, in the journals Contact (of which he was an editor), Contemporary Music Review, Musical Times and Tempo, and deals principally with new music, in particular experimental, minimalist and complex tendencies in American and European music. He was co-editor of Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart (1996, DACO Verlag, Stuttgart), a history of 50 years of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and of Uncommon Ground, a book on the music of Michael Finnissy (1998, Ashgate Press, London).

Fox has been hailed by Andy Hamilton in The Wire as "a tantalising figure in British Music"; Paul Driver in the Sunday Times has described his music as "impressive, thoughtful, entertaining and extremely varied". Fox's work regularly extends beyond the conventional boundaries of the concert hall and includes the radio piece Three Constructions after Kurt Schwitters, commissioned by the BBC in 1993 and nominated for the Prix Italia, gallery works in collaboration with video artists and printmakers, and a number of extended ensemble works which defy categorisation. Paul Griffiths, writing in the Times, has said of Fox's work that "he takes simple ideas but he makes them sound quite wonderful".