Nicholas Shakespeare | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 3 March 1957 Worcester, Worcestershire, England |
| Language | English |
| Alma mater | Magdalene College, Cambridge |
| Relatives | Geoffrey Shakespeare (great-uncle) [1] [2] |
Nicholas William Richmond Shakespeare FRSL (born 3 March 1957) is a British novelist and biographer, described by the Wall Street Journal as "one of the best English novelists of our time". [3] Shakespeare is also known for his charity work.
Born in Worcester, England to diplomat John William Richmond Shakespeare and his wife Lalage Ann, daughter of the travel writer and journalist S. P. B. Mais, [4] Shakespeare grew up in the Far East and in South America, including Brazil, where his father worked at the British Embassy between 1966 and 1969. John Shakespeare was later chargé d'affaires at Buenos Aires, [5] before serving as Ambassador to Peru from 1983 to 1987, and Ambassador to Morocco from 1987 to 1990. Nicholas was educated at the Dragon School preparatory school in Oxford, then at Winchester College and at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He worked as a journalist for BBC television and then on The Times as assistant arts and literary editor. From 1988 to 1991, he was literary editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph . [6]
Shakespeare's time in South America is represented in two novels, The Vision of Elena Silves (1989, Somerset Maugham Award, Betty Trask Award) and The Dancer Upstairs (1995, American Library Association Award for The Best Novel of the Year). Other works from this period are The Men Who Would Be King (1984), Londoners (1986) and The High Flyer (1993, long-listed for the Booker Prize).
In 1999, Shakespeare published his biography of Bruce Chatwin to widespread critical acclaim. This was followed by the novel Snowleg (2004, long-listed for the Booker Prize, Dublin IMPAC Award) a "place" book, In Tasmania (2004, winner of the Tasmania Book Prize 2007), Secrets of the Sea (2007, short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer's prize) and Inheritance (2010, long-listed for Dublin IMPAC Award). In 2010, he published Under the Sun, the letters of Bruce Chatwin, which he co-edited with Elizabeth Chatwin.
Nicholas Shakespeare has made several extended biographies for television: on Evelyn Waugh, Mario Vargas Llosa, [7] Bruce Chatwin, [8] Martha Gellhorn, and Dirk Bogarde. [9] The Dancer Upstairs was made into a feature film of the same name in 2002, [10] for which Shakespeare wrote the screenplay and which John Malkovich directed. Shakespeare was nominated as one of Granta 's Best of British Young Novelists in 1993. He has written articles for Granta, the London Review of Books , The Times Literary Supplement and The Monthly , among other publications.
Shakespeare's novels, which have been translated into 22 languages, place ordinary people against a background of significant events, as with The Dancer Upstairs, which deals with Abimael Guzmán, leader of Peru's Shining Path; and Snowleg, set partly during the Cold War in East Germany.
In 1999, Shakespeare was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2010 Shakespeare was invited by the Anglo-Argentine Society to give the prestigious Borges Lecture in London.
In January 2012, according to journalists, Nicholas Shakespeare's writings were mistakenly confused for William Shakespeare's by French presidential candidate François Hollande [11] when he said: "Let me quote Shakespeare, 'they failed because they did not start with a dream'" (Je me permets de citer Shakespeare, ils ont échoué parce qu'ils n'ont pas commencé par le rêve.)
In 2013, Shakespeare published an account of his aunt, Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France.
In 2015, Shakespeare published a collection of stories, Stories from Other Places. The central novella, "Oddfellows", was based on the Battle of Broken Hill, a little-known jihadi attack in the Australian outback 100 years ago. On 1 January 1915, two Afghan camel drivers answered the Turkish sultan's call for a holy war against the British Empire, and attacked a picnic train of 1200 men women and children in the iron-ore town of Broken Hill, killing four. The incident was the only known act of hostility on Australian soil in World War One. The Sunday Telegraph described them as "honed miniatures" and the Australian critic Peter Craven in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote: "I do not expect to read a more formidable piece of short fiction this year."
In 2016, Shakespeare was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he wrote the historical narrative "Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister" (2017), about the disastrous Norway Campaign of April 1940, which led to Churchill's unanticipated accession on Friday 10 May. Shakespeare's account was nominated as a Book of the Year in The Economist , The Guardian , The Observer , The Scotsman , The Daily Telegraph (as No. 2 of "the Best 50 Books of 2017"), and The Australian , where Peter Craven wrote: "Shakespeare has written a book that will captivate readers and fill professional historians with envy at how far he outclasses them."
In 2024, Shakespeare published Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, a biography of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. [12] The project was authorised by Fleming's estate. [13] The Wall Street Journal's Anna Mundow called the book "arresting", The Economist called it "definitive", [14] The Australian "a masterpiece... His book is better than almost any non-fiction ever gets, a work of literature in its own right", [15] while Washington Post columnist Michael Dirda also praised Shakespeare's work as 'a dazzling, even dizzying achievement'. [16] CrimeReads named the work one of its "best reviewed" books in April 2024. [17]
Shakespeare promoted the Fleming biography at literature festivals and other global events, including a collaboration with the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. [18] [19] [20] He claimed he took on the project after "discovering that [Fleming's] war work was indeed significant, as well as how much kinder he was in life than his posthumous caricature suggested." [21] [22]
Shakespeare has worked with charities such as Oxfam, for which he has written several times, and the Anita Goulden Trust, of which he has been the patron since 2000; the charity, which helps children in the Peruvian city of Piura, was set up following an article that Shakespeare wrote for the Daily Telegraph magazine, which raised more than £350,000.
In 2009, Shakespeare donated the short story "The Death of Marat" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Shakespeare's contribution was published in the Earth collection. [23] He also contributed a story, "The Return of the Native", to OxTravels, a travel anthology that was produced to raise money for Oxfam's work.
In October 2012, Shakespeare travelled to Cambodia with photographer Emma Hardy to visit Oxfam's work. He wrote two articles about the trip, "Beyond The Killing Fields", [24] which was published in Intelligent Life , and "How The Dead Live", [25] which was published in New Statesman .
The James Bond series focuses on the titular character, a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have written authorised Bond novels or novelisations: Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd, and Anthony Horowitz. The latest novel is With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz, published in May 2022. Additionally Charlie Higson wrote a series on a young James Bond, and Kate Westbrook wrote three novels based on the diaries of a recurring series character, Moneypenny.
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British writer, best known for his postwar James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing.
You Only Live Twice is the eleventh novel and twelfth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series of stories. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom on 26 March 1964 and sold out quickly. It was the last Fleming novel published in his lifetime. It is the concluding chapter in what is known as the "Blofeld Trilogy" after Thunderball and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Robyn Davidson is an Australian writer best known for her 1980 book Tracks, about her 2,700 km trek across the deserts of Western Australia using camels. Her career of travelling and writing about her travels has spanned 40 years. Her memoir, Unfinished Woman was published in late 2023.
Charles Bruce Chatwin was an English travel writer, novelist and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia (1977), established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982), while his novel Utz (1988) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times ranked Chatwin as number 46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."
The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth novel and tenth book in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, first published by Jonathan Cape on 16 April 1962. It is the shortest and most sexually explicit of Fleming's novels, as well as the only Bond novel told in the first person. Its narrator is a young Canadian woman, Viv Michel. Bond himself does not appear until two-thirds of the way through the book, arriving at precisely the right moment to save Viv from being raped and murdered by two criminals. Fleming wrote a prologue to the novel giving the character Viv credit as a co-author.
The Diamond Smugglers is a non-fiction work by Ian Fleming that was first published in 1957 in the United Kingdom and in 1958 in the United States. The book is based on two weeks of interviews Fleming undertook with John Collard, a member of the International Diamond Security Organisation (IDSO), which was headed by Sir Percy Sillitoe, the ex-chief of MI5 who worked for the diamond company De Beers.
John George Pearson was an English novelist and an author of biographies, notably of Ian Fleming, of the Sitwells, and of the Kray twins.
Ian Raymond Ogilvy is an English actor, playwright and novelist.
Casino Royale is the first novel by the British author Ian Fleming. Published in 1953, it is the first James Bond book, and it paved the way for a further eleven novels and two short story collections by Fleming, followed by numerous continuation Bond novels by other authors.
Richard Wasey Chopping was a British illustrator and author best known for painting the dust jackets of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels starting with From Russia, with Love (1957).
In Patagonia is an English travel book by Bruce Chatwin, published in 1977, about Patagonia, the southern part of South America.
Harvill Secker is a British publishing company formed in 2005 from the merger of Secker & Warburg and the Harvill Press.
Devil May Care is a James Bond continuation novel written by Sebastian Faulks. It was published in the UK by Penguin Books on 28 May 2008, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ian Fleming, the creator of Bond. The story centers on Bond's investigation into Dr. Julius Gorner, a megalomaniac chemist with a deep-seated hatred of England.
The Queen Anne Press is a small publisher.
A bibliography of reference material associated with the James Bond films, novels and genre.
Solo is a James Bond continuation novel written by William Boyd. It was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 26 September 2013 in hardback, e-book and audio editions, and in the US by HarperCollins on 8 October 2013.
Trigger Mortis is a 2015 James Bond novel written by Anthony Horowitz, and commissioned by the estate of Bond's creator Ian Fleming, which was published on 8 September 2015.
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin is a 2019 British documentary film by German director Werner Herzog. It chronicles the life of British travel writer Bruce Chatwin and includes interviews with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth Chatwin, and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, as well as detailing Herzog's own friendship and collaboration with the man.
