John (Jack) Iggulden grew up during the Great Depression. After beginning his education at Gardenvale State School and Hampton High School, he left formal education to enter his family's industrial engineering business at the age of thirteen. At the age of fourteen Iggulden met David Unaipon, who used Iggulden's manufacturing plant to carve the boomerangs he sold for a living and to develop his perpetual motion machine. Iggulden later used Unaipon as a model for his fictional character Peter Jirapon in Dark Stranger.
Iggulden enlisted in the Volunteer Defence Force during World War II. He was an enthusiastic glider pilot from the age of fifteen and from 1959-1960 he was Australian national gliding champion. His interest in areodynamics is reflected in his 1964 novel The Clouded Sky. Iggulden also edited a gliding procedures manual and handbook. Another interest was environmental protection, a concern Iggulden pursued actively during his years in Bellingen, New South Wales.
As well as his five novels Iggulden edited several anthologies of short stories and in the 1980s he established Cobham Publishers to publish his trilogy, The Promised Land Papers, a series exploring the economic future of Australia. In 1997 he published Silent Lies: A Survival Handbook into the 21st Century for 1990s Students, and Others with Serious Future Concerns.
A collection of Igguleden's papers at the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina, USA, includes typescript manucripts for two unpublished volumes of autobiography, several short autobiographical sketches and some unpublished poems.
