Author photo by Conrad Williams
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Nicholas Royle
Nicholas Royle was born in Manchester in 1963. He is the author of a short story collection, two novellas and six novels. A new novel, First Novel, will be published in 2013 by Jonathan Cape. He has edited fifteen anthologies including the British Fantasy Award-winning Darklands, the bestselling A Book of Two Halves, The Time Out Book of Paris Short Stories, Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds and The Best British Short Stories 2012. He divides his time between Manchester and London and is a senior creative writing lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He also runs Nightjar Press. Novels Counterparts (Barrington Books 1993/Penguin 1995) Saxophone Dreams (Penguin 1996) The Matter of the Heart (Abacus 1997) The Director’s Cut (Abacus 2000) Antwerp (Serpent’s Tail 2004) Regicide (Solaris 2011) Short Story Collections Mortality (Serpent’s Tail 2006) ‘Nicholas Royle has established a reputation for stylish prose studded with the coolest cultural references and a genre-defying imagination’ Jake Elliot, Flux ‘An assiduous champion of the short story’ Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday ‘Nicholas Royle is a novelist for our time, writing in the no-man’s land between the image and the word, where the Old World is confronted by the New and the 20th Century seeps into the 21st’ Steve Erickson ‘Nobody writes novels quite like Nicholas Royle. Nobody else’s novels have this extraordinary texture: full of bizarre cultural reference points, but always shaped into something coherent and accessible by his natural gift for storytelling – a gift that few of his contemporaries can rival. His books are a tonic for our jaded palates’ Jonathan Coe ‘One of the things Royle does excellently is portray the inner life of contemporary urban intellectuals; one of the reasons for the game of genre is that he wants to do this without getting stuck in the Hampstead or campus novel rut’ Roz Kaveney, Time Out ‘The respectably raffish English novelist Nicholas Royle’ Ken Wright, Glasgow Herald ‘Royle writes with a dark intensity’ John Vervoort, De Standaard ‘It’s rare to find a novelist who appeals to fans of both serious literature and crime fiction. He’s the only writer I’d happily describe as a cross between Iain Sinclair and Ian Rankin’ Stewart Home, Big Issue in the North ‘The deftness with which subtle nuances of personality are captured is a hallmark of Royle’s work’ Peter Tennant, The Third Alternative ‘Royle obviously knows London like the back of a cab driver’s hand’ Emily Ormond, Guardian ‘In his prose he mines a fertile seam that runs from structural experiment through to a sly and subtle respect for the tried and tested practices of established literary models’ Gareth Evans, Entropy |