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Matthew Kneale (born 24 November 1960) is a British writer. He is best known for his 2000 novel English Passengers .
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Matthew Kneale (born 24 November 1960) is a British writer. He is best known for his 2000 novel English Passengers .
Kneale was born on 24 November 1960 in London, the son of screenwriter Nigel Kneale, [1] and the children's writer Judith Kerr. He is also the grandson of Alfred Kerr, a German theatre critic and essayist, who as a dissident and critic of the Nazi Party was forced to flee Germany with his family in 1933. Matthew first accompanied his mother on a visit to Germany in 1967. [2]
Kneale was brought up in Barnes, attended Latymer Upper School in West London, and then studied modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford. Growing up, he was fascinated by other cultures, past and present, and as a student he travelled in Europe, South America, Central America and the Indian subcontinent. After graduating he knew he wanted to write but had little idea how to set about such a thing. He traveled to Tokyo, where he found work teaching English [3] and began writing a diary and short stories. Later, on returning to England, his experience in Japan inspired his first novel, Whore Banquets.
During the next few years Kneale lived primarily in London, travelled, spent a year in Rome, and wrote his second novel, Inside Rose's Kingdom. In 1990 he moved to Oxford, where he wrote two historical novels, Sweet Thames and English Passengers. He also developed an interest in languages, attempting to learn Spanish, Romanian, Albanian and Amharic (Ethiopian). In 2000 he married Shannon Russell and they moved to Italy and Shannon's homeland of Canada. He and his wife now live in Rome with their two children. [4]
Kneale's first novel, Whore Banquets, tells the story of an Englishman whose affair with a Tokyo woman brings him into the realm of Japanese organized crime. It won the 1988 Somerset Maugham Award [5] and the 1988 Betty Trask Award. [6] It was later republished as Mr Foreigner. [3]
Inside Rose's Kingdom follows a young innocent who moves from the countryside to London, where he becomes caught up with a group of controlling, emotionally grasping people.
Sweet Thames is set in London in 1849 and tells the story of the trials of an enlightened drainage engineer whose wife vanishes during a cholera epidemic. It won the 1993 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
English Passengers tells the story of a religious-scientific expedition that seeks to find the Garden of Eden in Tasmania, a land whose aboriginal culture had been experiencing brutal destruction at the hands of British settlers and convicts. The novel is told by more than 20 voices. It won the 2000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was a finalist for the Booker Prize [3] and the Australian Miles Franklin Award. In translation the book won France's Relay Prix d'Evasion. Interviewed in 2001, Kneale said that J. G. Farrell was a writer whom he particularly admired, as one who "wrote about the British Empire – and scathingly – back in the 1970s, when few in Britain wanted to think about the uglier parts of their country's past." [7]
Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance is a volume of 12 short stories set around the world, from Colombia to London to Africa. They examine the lives of people as they struggled to survive and do the right thing, sometimes managing neither. One of the stories, "Powder", about a failed lawyer whose life changes when he chances upon a stash of cocaine and a mobile phone, was made into the French feature film, Une Pure Affaire.
When We Were Romans is told from the point of view of a boy, Laurence, whose mother suddenly and unexpectedly decides that she and her children, and even Laurence's hamster, must flee England to Rome, where she lived many years before.
An Atheist's History of Belief is Kneale's first nonfiction book. [3] It looks at the beliefs that people have devised to explain their world, from earliest prehistoric times to the present, as understood by a fascinated non-believer. His second work of nonfiction, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings is a social and cultural history spanning centuries.
Pilgrims is a comic novel set in medieval times, mainly in 1289, about a group of heterogeneous individuals who band together on a journey from England to Rome on a religious pilgrimage, each with his or her own intentions.
William Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.
Thomas Nigel Kneale was a British screenwriter who wrote professionally for more than 50 years, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and was twice nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay.
Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru is an English novelist and journalist. He is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears and Red Pill. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
The Quatermass Experiment is a British science fiction serial broadcast by BBC Television during the summer of 1953 and re-staged by BBC Four in 2005. Set in the near future against the background of a British space programme, it tells the story of the first crewed flight into space, supervised by Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group.
Quatermass is a 1979 British television science fiction serial. Produced by Euston Films for Thames Television, it was broadcast on the ITV network in October and November 1979. Like its three predecessors, Quatermass was written by Nigel Kneale. It is the fourth and final television serial to feature the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass. In this story, the character is played by John Mills.
Anna Judith Gertrud Helene Kerr was a Jewish, German-born British writer and illustrator whose books sold more than 10 million copies around the world. She created both enduring picture books such as the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came to Tea and acclaimed novels for older children such as the semi-autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which gave a child's-eye view of escaping Hitler's persecution in the Second World War. Born in the Weimar Republic, she came to Britain with her family in 1935 to escape persecution during the rise of the Nazis.
The Somerset Maugham Award is a British literary prize given each year by the Society of Authors. Set up by William Somerset Maugham in 1947 the awards enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience in foreign countries. The awards go to writers under the age of 30 with works published in the year before the award; the work can be either non-fiction, fiction or poetry. Since 1964 multiple winners have usually been chosen in the same year. In 1975 and in 2012 the award was not given.
The Society of Authors (SoA) is a United Kingdom trade union for professional writers, illustrators and literary translators, founded in 1884 to protect the rights and further the interests of authors. As of September 2019, it represents 11,000 members and associates.
Giles Foden is an English author, best known for his novel The Last King of Scotland (1998).
Nicholas Laird is a Northern Irish novelist and poet.
Fred D'Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for first novels written by authors under the age of 35, who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. Each year the awards total £20,000, with one author receiving a larger prize amount, called the "Prize", and the remainder given to one or more other writers, called the "Awards". The award was established in 1984 by the Society of Authors, at the bequest of the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels. The awards are given to traditional or romantic novels, rather than those of an experimental style, and can be for published or unpublished works.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is British writer Jon McGregor's first novel, which was first published by Bloomsbury in 2002. It portrays a day in the life of a suburban British street, with the plot alternately following the lives of the street's various inhabitants. All but one person's viewpoint is described in the third person, and the narrative uses a flowing grammatical style which mimics their thought processes.
Jon McGregor is a British novelist and short story writer. In 2002, his first novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize, making him the youngest ever contender. His second and fourth novels were longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006 and 2017 respectively. In 2012, his third novel, Even the Dogs, was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award. The New York Times has labelled him a "wicked British writer".
English Passengers (ISBN 0-385-49744-X) is a 2000 historical novel written by Matthew Kneale, which won that year's Whitbread Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. It is narrated by 20 different characters and tells the story of a voyage to look for the Garden of Eden in Tasmania and the decimation of that island’s indigenous population of Aboriginal Tasmanians.
Peter Benson is the author of novels, plays, short stories and poetry, and has been described by the London Evening Standard as having "one of the most distinctive voices in modern British fiction".
Gwendoline Riley is an English writer.
Justin Hill is an English novelist.
Peter Ackroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charles Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on Granta magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Her 2021 novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, making her the first British Somali novelist to get this honour. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including The Guardian, and contributed poetry to the anthology New Daughters of Africa. She was also a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London until 2021. She will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in Spring 2022.
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