James Lovegrove

Early life

Lovegrove was educated at Radley College, Oxfordshire, and was one of the subjects of a 1979 BBC television series, Public School. A follow-up programme was broadcast on 27 October 2013, in which Lovegrove talked about his experiences of attending the school and about public school education in general. He later studied English literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

Career

Lovegrove's first novel was The Hope, published by Macmillan in 1990. He was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1998 for his novel Days and for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2004 for his novel Untied Kingdom. His short story "Carry The Moon in My Pocket" won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Foreign Language Short Story.

Lovegrove's work tends towards the literary end of the SF/fantasy spectrum and usually carries a dystopian, satirical edge, much in the tradition of J. G. Ballard and John Wyndham. His subject matter is often the corrupting effects of wealth and commercialism, and recurring motifs are duality and the clash or reconciliation of opposites. Lovegrove has a fondness for wordplay, not only in his prose but sometimes as a plot device, as in the back-to-back double novella Gig, where palindromes form a key part of the narrative, and the novel Provender Gleed, whose cast of characters includes a pair of detectives who solve crimes through the use of anagrams.

Lovegrove has written young adult fiction, most notably a series of fantasy novels, The Clouded World, under a pseudonym (Jay Amory). These have been translated into nine languages so far. He has also written a number of short novels published by Barrington Stoke, a company specialising in books for reluctant readers. Two of his titles for that company have been longlisted for the Manchester Book Award.

His recent Pantheon series is a set of standalone military science fiction adventure novels featuring the gods of ancient mythologies. Seven have been published so far: The Age of Ra, The Age of Zeus, The Age of Odin (a New York Times best seller), The Age of Aztec, Age of Voodoo, Age of Shiva and Age of Heroes. In 2013, Lovegrove published an omnibus collecting three Pantheon novellas, entitled The Age of Godpunk.

As an illustrator, Lovegrove has executed design and poster work for Flying Pig Systems, makers of the Wholehog range of lighting control products, and drew the pictures for the Echo Beach line of postcards and T-shirts.

He has contributed reviews and journalism to magazines such as The Literary Review, Interzone and BBC MindGames Magazine and cryptic crosswords to the weekend section of The Independent. He is a regular reviewer of fiction for the Financial Times and of graphic novels for Comic Heroes.

Since 2013 he has begun publishing Sherlock Holmes pastiche novels for Titan Books, including a mash-up trilogy, Cthulhu Casebooks, that crosses over the literary worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft.