Andrew O'HaganFRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
O'Hagan was born in Glasgow City Centre in 1968,[1][2] of Irish Catholic descent, and grew up in Kilwinning, North Ayrshire.[3] His mother was a school cleaner, his father worked as a joiner in Paisley, and he had four elder brothers.[1] His father was a violent alcoholic, and as a boy, he would hide books from his father under his bed.[4]
He attended St Winning's Primary then St Michael's Academy before studying at the University of Strathclyde,[3] the first in his family to reach tertiary education. He earned his BA (Honours) in English in 1990.[1]
In 1995, he published his first book, The Missing, which drew from his own childhood and explored the lives of people who have gone missing in Britain and the families left behind. The Missing was shortlisted for three literary awards: the Esquire Award, the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award, and the McVities Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year award.[2]
In 2006, his third novel, Be Near Me, was published by Faber & Faber and longlisted for that year's Man Booker Prize. It went on to win the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.[7] In 2008, he edited a new selection of Robert Burns's poems for Canongate Books, published as A Night Out with Robert Burns. A copy was lodged in every secondary school in Scotland. Following on from this, he wrote and presented a three-part film on Burns for the BBC, The World According to Robert Burns, first on 5 January 2009. In January 2011, Scotland on Sunday gave away 80,000 copies of the book. Also in 2008, Faber & Faber published O'Hagan's first non-fiction collection, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Saltire Book of the Year Award.[8]
His 2010 novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe,[9] is told in the voice of a Scottish Maltese poodle ("Maf"), the name of the real dog given by Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe in 1960. It was published by Faber & Faber in May 2010 and won O'Hagan a Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award.
In 2012, O'Hagan worked on a theatrical production about the crisis in British newspapers, entitled Enquirer, with the National Theatre of Scotland.[10]
In March 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as a ghost-writer for Julian Assange's autobiography (published by Canongate and Alfred A. Knopf). His essay, entitled "Ghosting",[11] published in the London Review of Books, gained significant media attention because of his description of Assange's character and strained relationships with past and present colleagues.[12][13][14]
In 2015, O'Hagan published his fifth novel The Illuminations: A Novel, which was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize.[15]
In June 2016, the London Review of Books published a 35,612-word essay by O'Hagan, titled "The Satoshi Affair: Andrew O'Hagan on the many lives of Satoshi Nakamoto", which followed the events surrounding programmer Craig Wright's claim to be bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakomoto.[16] In the article, O'Hagan describes how he was approached by Wright and nTrust, a group that he was associated with, in order to cover the exposure of Craig Wright's identity as Satoshi. Though the article is inconclusive as to the true identity of Satoshi, some have taken it as evidence that Wright is a fraud.[17]
In October 2017, O'Hagan published The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age which includes stories about his attempt to help Julian Assange write his memoirs, the author using the identity of a deceased man to make a new life on the Internet, and expanding on Craig Wright's claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.[18]
In September 2020, O'Hagan published his sixth novel, Mayflies.[4]
Four of O'Hagan's books have received adaptations into different media. In 1996, Channel 4 Television presented Calling Bible John: Portrait of a Serial Killer, nominated for a BAFTA award.[2][20] In 2009, his novel Be Near Me was adapted by Ian McDiarmid for the Donmar Warehouse and the National Theatre of Scotland.
In September 2011, the National Theatre of Scotland presented The Missing as a play adapted by O'Hagan and directed by John Tiffany at Tramway, Glasgow.[21] The play received favourable reviews. The Daily Telegraph called it "a profound act of mourning and memory."[22]The Guardian called the work "an arresting, genre-defying work – part speculative memoir, part Orwellian social reportage" that "induces the kind of shock he [the author] must have experienced..."[23]
In June 2023, The Age reported that the FBI is seeking to gather new evidence in the Julian Assange case, based on a request from the FBI to interview O'Hagan. O'Hagan refused the request, and said to the newspaper that "I would not give a witness statement against a fellow journalist being pursued for telling the truth. I would happily go to jail before agreeing in any way to support the American security establishment in this cynical effort."[28]
Personal life
O'Hagan has a daughter, whose mother is fellow author India Knight.[29]
Recognition, awards and honours
O'Hagan was selected by the literary magazine Granta[30] for inclusion in their 2003 list of the top 20 young British novelists, and his novels have been translated into 15 languages.[19]
The Satoshi Affair: Andrew O’Hagan on the many lives of Satoshi Nakamoto (2016, non-fiction)[16]
"Ghosting"London Review of Books, 6 March 2014[11]
The Tower, a 60,000-word essay about the Grenfell Tower fire in The London Review of Books[35]
Related Research Articles
Maurice Gough Gee is a New Zealand novelist. He is one of New Zealand's most distinguished and prolific authors, having written over thirty novels for adults and children, and has won numerous awards both in New Zealand and overseas, including multiple top prizes at the New Zealand Book Awards, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the UK, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, the Robert Burns Fellowship and a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. In 2003 he was recognised as one of New Zealand's greatest living artists across all disciplines by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, which presented him with an Icon Award.
Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
Gregory Hollingshead, CM is a Canadian novelist. He was formerly a professor of English at the University of Alberta, and he lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Christopher Mackenzie Priest was a British novelist and science fiction writer. His works include Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), The Inverted World (1974), The Affirmation (1981), The Glamour (1984), The Prestige (1995), and The Separation (2002).
Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award and the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2004, he won the Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst is credited with having helped gay-themed fiction to break into the literary mainstream through his seven novels since 1988.
Michel Faber is a Dutch-born writer of English-language fiction, including his 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White, and Under the Skin (2000) which was adapted for film by Jonathan Glazer, starring Scarlett Johansson. His novel for young adults, D: A Tale of Two Worlds, was published in 2020. His book, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, a non-fiction work about music, came out in October 2023.
Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.
David Keenan is a Scottish writer and author of four novels.
Benjamin Myers FRSL is an English writer and journalist.
Tobias Jones is a British author, journalist, teacher and community-builder. He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, and then worked at the London Review of Books and the Independent on Sunday. He has written various works of fiction and non-fiction, and appears regularly on British and Italian TV and Radio. He lives in Parma in Italy.
John Burnside FRSL FRSE was a Scottish writer. He was one of four poets to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for one book. In Burnside's case it was for his 2011 collection, Black Cat Bone. In 2023, he won the David Cohen Prize.
Canongate Books is an independent publishing firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Joseph O'Neill is an Irish novelist and non-fiction writer. O'Neill's novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
Ernest Sackville Turner was an English freelance journalist and writer who wrote 20 published books, including Boys Will Be Boys, The Phoney War on the Home Front, and What The Butler Saw, and contributing to the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, and regularly to the English satirical weekly magazine Punch.
Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages. Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.
Our Fathers (1999) is the debut novel by Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1999). It was also nominated for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the International Dublin Literary Award.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a United States Army intelligence analyst: footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, U.S. military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has won multiple awards for publishing and journalism.
Luke Daniel Harding is a British journalist who is a foreign correspondent for The Guardian. He is known for his coverage of Russia under Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.
The Fifth Estate is a 2013 biographical thriller film directed by Bill Condon about the news-leaking website WikiLeaks. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as its editor-in-chief and founder Julian Assange and Daniel Brühl as its former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis, Alicia Vikander, Stanley Tucci, and Laura Linney are featured in supporting roles. The film's screenplay was written by Josh Singer based in-part on Domscheit-Berg's book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (2011), as well as WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (2011) by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. The film's name is a reference to people who operate in the manner of journalists outside the normal constraints imposed on the mainstream media.
Craig Steven Wright is an Australian computer scientist and businessman. He has publicly claimed to be the main part of the team that created bitcoin, and the identity behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. These claims are generally regarded as false by the media and the cryptocurrency community. In March 2024, Mr Justice James Mellor in the British High Court ruled that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. In July 2024, a British High Court judge referred Craig Wright to UK prosecutors for alleged perjury related to his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto. As of 2019, Wright lived in the United Kingdom.
References
1 2 3 "Andrew O'Hagan". University of Strathclyde. 27 June 2018. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
