Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby was born in 1957. He is the author of five previous novels, High Fidelity, About a Boy, How To Be Good, A Long Way Down (shortlisted for the Whitbread Award) and Slam; three works of non-fiction, Fever Pitch (winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award), 31 Songs (shortlisted for the National Books Critics Circle Award) and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree; and a Pocket Penguin book of short stories, Otherwise Pandemonium. His new novel, Juliet, Naked, is published in September 2009 and he recently wrote the screenplay for the film An Education, which is due for release in the UK in October 2009. Nick Hornby lives and works in Highbury, north London.

In his own words:

"I started by writing plays. They were sort of screen-cum-radio-cum-TV plays, and they weren't very good... When I left university and I tried to write, everything came out sounding like bad essays, so I thought I should stick to dialogue. I hadn't done enough reading-not of the things I wanted to emulate-so it took me a while, a long while, to grapple with voice... everything changed for me when I read Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Lorrie Moore, all in about '86-'87... voice, tone, simplicity, humour, soul ... all of these things seemed to be missing from the contemporary English fiction I'd looked at, and I knew then what I wanted to do"

Nick Hornby

Fact file

Name: Nick Hornby

Date of birth: 17.4.1957

Place of birth: Redhill, Surrey

Current Home: Highbury, North London.

Education: Cambridge University

Similar Authors: Tony Parsons, David Mitchell