Nationality UK Name J. Simons | Role Novelist | |
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Born Jonathan David Simons
27 August 1953 (age 70)
Glasgow, Scotland ( 1953-08-27 ) Books An Exquisite Sense (of, The Land Agent, The Credit Draper, The Liberation of Celia K | ||
J David Simons
J. David Simons (born 27 August 1953) is a Scottish novelist and short story writer. He was educated at Hutchesons' Boys Grammar School and graduated with a law degree from Glasgow University in 1973. He worked as a lawyer in Edinburgh, a cotton farmer on Kibbutz Ashdot Ya'akov Ichud in Israel, a charity administrator for the Cyrenians in West London, a university lecturer at Keio University, Japan, and a journalist for multi-national publishing house Informa, before returning to his native Glasgow in 2006 to pursue his career as a writer.
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Literary career
Simons' first novel The Credit Draper was published by Two Ravens Press in May 2008 and was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize in June 2009. This novel is set primarily within the Glasgow Jewish Community in the early part of the 20th century and represents the first part of his "Glasgow to Galilee" trilogy. Simons goes on to tackle issues of socialism, feminism and birth control in Glasgow during the 1920s in his second novel in this trilogy - The Liberation of Celia Kahn - which was published by Five Leaves Publications in February 2011 along with a re-print of The Credit Draper. His third novel An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful set in Japan was published by Saraband in March 2013 and examines the theme of denial, especially in regard to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States. In The Land Agent, the third novel in the "Glasgow to Galilee" trilogy, published by Saraband in October 2014, Simons turns his attention to 1920s Palestine and the conflict over a strategic piece of land that doesn't exist on any map. Apart from his fiction writing, Simons is also a mentor for the Scottish Book Trust.