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James Hamilton-Paterson is a diverse and talented author, and one of the most reclusive of British literary exiles. His work defies accurate definition, containing elements of travel writing, autobiography, fiction and science. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry, he never settled in England and has since travelled extensively. For many years he divided much of his time between Tuscany and the Philippines, and currently he lives in Austria. His many published works include books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and he has written articles for the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and Condé-Nast Traveller, in addition to columns on marine and scientific topics for the German-language magazines Das Magazin and Die Weltwoche.
James came to public attention with the publication of Gerontius (1989), a fictional reconstruction of the journey made by the composer Sir Edward Elgar to Brazil in 1923. Gerontius is regarded as among the best British novels of the 1980s, winning the Whitbread First Novel Award, and it is due to be reissued by Faber in 2008. James is also internationally known as a commentator on the Philippines, which has inspired a number of books. His novel Ghosts of Manila (1994) portrayed the Philippine capital in all its decay and violence, and the non-fiction work America's Boy (1998) set the Marcos regime in the geopolitical context of the time. The range of his projects is astonishing, and another of his great passions is the sea: Seven-Tenths (1992), a far-ranging meditation upon the sea and its meanings, was fully revised and re-published by Faber in 2007.
James has more recently turned his hand to comedy, and his idiosyncratic comedy novel Cooking with Fernet Branca (2004) was long-listed for the 2004 Booker and winner of ‘Bookered Out’, the BBC People’s Booker. The sequel, called Amazing Disgrace, was published to critical acclaim by Faber in 2006, and prompted Ian Thomson in The Spectator to call James “one of our finest prose stylists… a national treasure”. A third (and possibly final) Gerry Samper book, called Rancid Pansies, will follow in 2008.
Recent books:
Rancid Pansies (Faber: due 2008)
Seven-Tenths (Faber: 2007)
Amazing Disgrace (Faber: 2006)
Cooking with Fernet Branca (Faber: 2004)
Loving Monsters (Granta: 2001)
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