Rupert Thomson

Biography

Rupert Thomson was born on 5 November 1955 in Eastbourne, East Sussex, England. Following the sudden death of his mother, Rupert Thomson was educated as a boarder at Christ's Hospital School. At the age of seventeen, he was awarded a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. He worked as a copywriter in London from 1978 to 1982, before abandoning his job to write full-time.

Once described by the critic James Wood as "one of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction", and compared to writers as various as Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Charles Dickens, Elmore Leonard, and Mervyn Peake, he is the author of nine critically acclaimed novels. His fourth novel, The Insult, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of All Time. More recently, Death of a Murderer was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year.

His sixth novel, The Book of Revelation, was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos.

With his 2010 memoir, This Party's Got to Stop, he ventured into non-fiction for the first time, and explored events surrounding his father's death, and his complex relationship with his brothers and his extended family. This Party's Got to Stop won the Writers' Guild Non Fiction Book of the Year.

His new novel, Secrecy, which was published in March 2013, is based on the life and work of the eccentric Sicilian wax artist, Gaetano Giulio Zumbo.

Thomson has lived in many cities throughout the world, including New York, Sydney and Barcelona. He currently lives in South London.

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2015.

Novels

Memoir