Mike Gayle | |
---|---|
Born | October 1970 Quinton, Birmingham, England |
Occupation | Author |
Genre | Lad lit, popular fiction |
Website | |
mikegayle |
Mike Gayle (born October 1970) is an English journalist and novelist. [1]
Gayle was born in Quinton, Birmingham, to parents from Jamaica, and is the younger brother of broadcaster Phil Gayle. He attended Lordswood Boys' School where he was Head Boy. [2] He studied Sociology and Journalism at university. [3]
Gayle edited a music fanzine and joined a Birmingham listings magazine before moving to London and beginning a postgraduate diploma in journalism. Before having his first novel published, he was a features editor and later an agony aunt for Just Seventeen and Bliss . As a freelance journalist he has written for the Sunday Times , The Guardian , The Times , the Daily Express , FHM , More! , The Scotsman and Top of the Pops . [1]
Gayle is a chick-lit author, although he has expressed a dislike for the term. [4] Alongside Tony Parsons and Tim Lott, he has also been associated with a "new wave of fictions about inadequate young British masculinities". [5]
Gayle is friends with Danny Wallace, who has dubbed Mike his Minister of Home Affairs in the Kingdom of Lovely. He lives in Harborne with his daughters and his wife Claire. [2]
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations among human psychology, technology, sex, and the mass media. Ballard became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels, such as The Drowned World (1962), but also courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968), and the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists.
Jonathan Turner Meades is an English writer and film-maker, primarily on the subjects of place, culture, architecture and food. His work spans journalism, fiction, essays, memoir and over fifty highly idiosyncratic television films, and has been described as "brainy, scabrous, mischievous", "iconoclastic", and possessed of "a polymathic breadth of knowledge and truly caustic wit".
Skellig is a children's novel by the British author David Almond, published by Hodder in 1998. It was the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year and it won the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British author. In the US it was a runner up for the Michael L. Printz Award, which recognises one work of young adult fiction annually. Since publication, it has also been adapted into a play, an opera, and a film. In 2010, a prequel entitled My Name is Mina was published, written by David Almond himself. William Blake poems are also in the book, the play and the film.
Paul Mackintosh Foot was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
William "Bill" Wall is an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer.
Howard Anthony Gayle is an English former footballer who played for Birmingham City, Blackburn Rovers, Fulham, Halifax Town, Liverpool, Newcastle United, Sunderland and Stoke City.
David Ewan Marr FAHA is an Australian journalist, author and progressive political and social commentator. His areas of expertise include the law, Australian politics, censorship, the media and the arts. He writes for The Monthly, The Saturday Paper and Guardian Australia.
Philip Ballantyne Kerr was a British author, best known for his Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers.
Robert Duncan Drewe is an Australian novelist, non-fiction and short story writer.
Benjamin Myers is an English writer and journalist.
Paul Farley, FRSL is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.
Tim Lott is a British author. He worked as a music journalist and ran a magazine publishing business, launching Flexipop magazine in 1980 with ex-Record Mirror journalist Barry Cain.
Tim Jones is a New Zealand writer and poet.
William Henry Jones, also known as Bullet Jones and the Tipton Smasher, was an English professional footballer who played as a centre forward for Small Heath in the Football League and for Brighton & Hove Albion in the Southern League.
Dudley Allen Doust was an American-born sports journalist and author who in addition to publishing a number of books wrote for The Kansas City Star, Time and The Sunday Times.
Lis Howell is director of broadcasting at City, University of London, running the broadcasting and television journalism programmes, and also deputy head of the journalism department. She is a journalist who went on to become a senior executive in British television and also writes murder-mystery novels.
Jeremy Lott is an American writer, editor, and pundit. He briefly worked at the news website Rare. Previously, Lott was the editor of Real Clear Religion and associate editor of Real Clear Science. Lott has written several books and articles, with his work appearing in well over 100 publications, including the National Post, Australian Financial Review, the Financial Times, the Guardian, Politico, and The American Prospect.
The literary tradition of Birmingham originally grew out of the culture of religious puritanism that developed in the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Birmingham's location away from established centres of power, its dynamic merchant-based economy and its weak aristocracy gave it a reputation as a place where loyalty to the established power structures of church and feudal state were weak, and saw it emerge as a haven for free-thinkers and radicals, encouraging the birth of a vibrant culture of writing, printing and publishing.
Lad lit was a term used principally from the 1990s to the early 2010s to describe male-authored popular novels about young men and their emotional and personal lives.
Fredoon Kabraji was an Indian poet, writer, journalist, and artist of Parsi descent.
Other authors associated with this new wave of fictions about inadequate young British masculinities include Tony Parsons ( Man and Boy , 1991), Tim Lott, and Mike Gayle.