Garen was born in 1969 and spent most of his spare time lying on the floor drawing and making up stories. After a number of different jobs, including cleaner, stagehand, hotel porter, mushroom farm porter, newspaper ad designer and multimedia designer, he eventually became a full-time illustrator in 2002.

Since then he has worked on a wide variety of projects for a wide range of clients, including the BBC, The Observer, the NUT, Josef Weinberger, Webb & Webb, Fine Food World, David Fickling Books, Royal Mail ... and many more.

His biggest audience (estimated at between 30–40 million people) was for the first national public digital comic, appearing on street screens across the UK in 2015 for JCDecaux's Arni's Epic Adventures. Other high-profile work includes one of his designs being approved by HM the Queen for use by Royal Mail as a 97p stamp in 2009, Osprey Games' best-selling The Lost Expedition card game, and Maschinen-Mensch's unrelated award-winning computer adventure game Curious Expedition 2.

Garen's comic adventure The Rainbow Orchid was published by Egmont in 2009, followed by editions in Dutch, French, Spanish, German and Danish. It won the Young People's Comic Award at the 2013 British Comics Awards and was named one of The Observer's Best Graphic Novels of 2012.

An amateur historian (the Second Anglo-Afghan War 1878–80), karate sensei, genealogist, and one-time bassist in a band or two, Garen lives in West Sussex, England, where he works in his home studio, and where his wife (a freelance editor and writer), two children and the cat can keep an eye on him.

You can see some interviews with Garen here.