Alex Christofi

Last updated

Alex Christofi is a British author and book editor.

Contents

Early life

Christofi was born in Dorset to a British mother and Cypriot father, and grew up in Bournemouth. [1] He was educated at Bournemouth School, where his father was a teacher. [2]

He earned a degree in English from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. [1] [3]

Career

Before publishing his first novel, Christofi worked as a literary agent for over five years. In 2015, he published his debut novel Glass. It tells the story of Gunter Glass, a 22-year-old, half-German window cleaner. [1] For Glass, he won the 2016 Betty Trask Prize. [4] In 2017, he published his second novel, Let Us Be True, about a German-born couple falling in love in post-war France. [5] His biography Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life was shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize. [6]

In 2015, Christofi was appointed commissioning editor for non-fiction at Oneworld, previously working for Conville and Walsh. [7] In February 2020, it was announced he would be leaving Oneworld to join Transworld Publishers's non-fiction team as an editorial director in April of that year. [8]

"Book Murderer" Viral Controversy

In early 2020, Christofi tweeted a photograph of several books cut in half, saying he cuts "long books in half to make them more portable." The tweet subsequently went viral, becoming the subject of several news stories and caused a large amount of conversation on Twitter. [9] [10] He later wrote an editorial for The Guardian entitled "I am the 'book murderer', but I tear them apart out of love." [11]

Personal life

Christofi currently lives in London. [12]

Published works

Related Research Articles

Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hallie Rubenhold</span> British historian and author

Hallie Rubenhold is an American-born British historian and author. Her work specializes in 18th and 19th century social history and women's history. Her 2019 book The Five, about the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction. Rubenhold's focus on the victims of murder, rather than on the identity or the acts of the perpetrator, has been credited with changing attitudes to the proper commemoration of such crimes and to the appeal and function of the true crime genre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maggie O'Farrell</span> Irish-British novelist, born 1972

Maggie O'Farrell, RSL, is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award: for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Gwendoline Riley is an English writer.

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is the United Kingdom's first literary award for comic literature. Established in 2000 and named in honour of P. G. Wodehouse, past winners include Paul Torday in 2007 with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and Marina Lewycka with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian 2005 and Jasper Fforde for The Well of Lost Plots in 2004. Gary Shteyngart was the first American winner in 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Dean (author)</span> English novelist, living

Louise Dean is an English author. Her novels won the Betty Trask Award and Le Prince Maurice Prize, and were longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and The Booker Prize. Short stories of hers have appeared in Granta Magazine. She was a finalist in the 2021 Costa Book Awards. She founded and directs a worldwide creative writing school, The Novelry. The Nobel Prizewinner J. M. Coetzee is among many authors to acclaim her writing.

Oneworld Publications is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey originally to publish accessible non-fiction by experts and academics for the general market. Based in London, it later added a literary fiction list and both a children's list and an upmarket crime list, and now publishes across a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, current affairs, popular science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, as well as literary fiction, crime fiction and suspense, and children's titles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aminatta Forna</span> Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer

Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurie Penny</span> English journalist, columnist and author

Laurie Penny is a British journalist and writer. Penny has written articles for publications including The Guardian,The New York Times and Salon. Penny is a contributing editor at the New Statesman and the author of several books on feminism, and they have also written for American television shows including The Haunting of Bly Manor and The Nevers.

Evelyn Rose Strange "Evie" Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize in 2021.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave FRSL is a British poet, playwright and novelist. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Nathan Filer is a British writer best known for his debut novel, The Shock of the Fall. This won several major literary awards, including the Costa Book of the Year and the Betty Trask Prize. It was a Sunday Times Bestseller, and has been translated into thirty languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana Evans</span> British novelist, journalist and critic (born 1972)

Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elnathan John</span> Nigerian novelist, satirist and lawyer (born 1982)

Elnathan John is a Nigerian novelist, satirist and lawyer whose stories have twice been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chibundu Onuzo</span> Nigerian novelist

Imachibundu Oluwadara Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rowan Hisayo Buchanan</span> British-American writer (born 1989)

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan FRSL is a British-American writer. Her novels include Harmless Like You, which received a Betty Trask Award and the 2017 Author's Club First Novel Award, and Starling Days. She is the editor of Go Home!, an anthology of stories by Asian American writers. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Olaf Falafel</span>

Olaf Falafel is a comedian and a children's author, who illustrates his own books, he is also the creator and presenter of Art Club an online Art channel for kids. He has been a stand-up comedian since 2012 and was also known for making humorous Vines, which he shared on Twitter, and some of which went viral, until uploading of videos from Vine to Twitter was suspended in 2016. His humour frequently involves puns and absurdity. He is a supporter of Luton Town Football Club.

Dara Seamus McAnulty is a Northern Irish naturalist, writer and environmental campaigner. He is the youngest ever winner of the RSPB Medal and received the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing in 2020 after being the youngest author to be shortlisted for the award. He is also the youngest author to be long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction and for the shortlist for the 2020 Books Are My Bag Readers' Awards, which he won in the non-fiction category

<i>Shuggie Bain</i> 2020 novel by Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2020. It tells the story of the youngest of three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother Agnes in 1980s post-industrial working-class Glasgow.

Ben Richard Fergusson is a British writer and translator. He studied English Literature at Warwick University and Modern Languages at Bristol University. Before publishing his first novel he worked for ten years as an editor and publisher in the art world. Fergusson lives with his husband and son in Berlin, where he teaches at the University of Potsdam.

References

  1. 1 2 3 O'Kelly, Lisa; Hoggard, Liz; Jones, Corinne; Bromwich, Kathryn; Kellaway, Kate; Clark, Alex; Scholes, Lucy (11 January 2015). "New faces of fiction 2015". The Guardian. Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  2. Westhead, Ian (16 October 2019). "2019 Guest Speaker". oldbournemouthians.co.uk. Retrieved 21 January 2020.
  3. "LMH News – Issue 1 2018". Issuu. Retrieved 21 January 2020.
  4. Cowdrey, Katherine (22 June 2016). "Christofi debut wins £10k Betty Trask Prize | The Bookseller". The Bookseller . Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  5. Thomas, Carys (19 August 2017). "It's the Weekend: Book reviews". South Wales Argus. Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  6. "Atkins, Ypi and Christofi compete for Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize". The Bookseller. Retrieved 2023-07-17.
  7. Onwuemezi, Natasha (16 September 2015). "Oneworld appoints Christofi as commissioning editor | The Bookseller". The Bookseller. Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  8. Leslie, Florence (18 February 2020). "Christofi trades Oneworld for Transworld | The Bookseller". The Bookseller. Retrieved 20 February 2020.
  9. Rosenblatt, Kahlan. "Tweet about cutting books in half sends Twitter into tailspin". NBC News.
  10. Schaub, Michael. "'Book Murderer' Leaves Literary Twitter Aghast". Kirkus Reviews.
  11. Christofi, Alex. "I am the 'book murderer', but I tear them apart out of love". The Guardian.
  12. Fishwick, Samuel (16 July 2015). "Meet the debutants: hot summer reads by new novelists". Evening Standard. Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  13. Ashworth, Jenn (9 May 2015). "Glass by Alex Christofi review – a comic look at how to live". The Guardian.
  14. Marriott, James (12 August 2017). "Review: Let Us Be True by Alex Christofi". The Times.
  15. Wilson, Frances (2021-01-14). "Dostoevsky in Love by Alex Christofi review – unpredictable, dangerous and thrilling". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-07-17.