Andrew O'Hagan

Andrew O'Hagan (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author.

Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

O'Hagan was born in Glasgow city centre in 1968, of Irish Catholic descent, and grew up in Kilwinning, North Ayrshire.

His mother was a school cleaner, his father worked as a joiner in Paisley, and he had four elder brothers.

His father was a violent alcoholic, and as a boy, he would hide books from his father under his bed.

He attended St Winning's Primary then St Michael's Academy before studying at the University of Strathclyde, the first in his family to reach tertiary education.

He earned his BA (Honours) in English in 1990.

In 1991, O'Hagan joined the staff of the London Review of Books, where he worked for four years.

In 1995, he published his first book, The Missing, which drew from his own childhood and explored the lives of people who have gone missing in Britain and the families left behind.

The Missing was shortlisted for three literary awards: the Esquire Award, the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award, and the McVities Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year award.

In 1996, Channel 4 Television presented Calling Bible John: Portrait of a Serial Killer, nominated for a BAFTA award.

In 1999, his debut novel, Our Fathers was nominated for several awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the International Dublin Literary Award.

It won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.

In 2003, his next novel Personality, which has close similarities to the life of Lena Zavaroni, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

That same year, O'Hagan won the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2006, his third novel, Be Near Me, was published by Faber and Faber and long-listed for that year's Booker Prize.

It went on to win the Los Angeles Times's 2007 Prize for Fiction.

In 2008, he edited a new selection of Robert Burns's poems for Canongate Books, published as A Night Out with Robert Burns.

A copy was lodged in every secondary school in Scotland.

Also in 2008, Faber & Faber published O'Hagan's first non-fiction collection, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Saltire Book of the Year Award.

Following on from this, he wrote and presented a three-part film on Burns for the BBC, The World According to Robert Burns, first on 5 January 2009.

In 2009, his novel Be Near Me was adapted by Ian McDiarmid for the Donmar Warehouse and the National Theatre of Scotland.

His 2010 novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, is told in the voice of a Scottish Maltese poodle ("Maf"), the name of the real dog given by Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe in 1960.

It was published by Faber & Faber in May 2010 and won O'Hagan a Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award.

In January 2011, Scotland on Sunday gave away 80,000 copies of the book.

In September 2011, the National Theatre of Scotland presented The Missing as a play adapted by O'Hagan and directed by John Tiffany at Tramway, Glasgow.

The play received favourable reviews.

The Daily Telegraph called it "a profound act of mourning and memory."

In 2012, O'Hagan worked on a theatrical production about the crisis in British newspapers, entitled Enquirer, with the National Theatre of Scotland.

In March 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as a ghost-writer for Julian Assange's autobiography (published by Canongate and Alfred A. Knopf).

His essay, entitled "Ghosting", published in the London Review of Books, gained significant media attention because of his description of Assange's character and strained relationships with past and present colleagues.

In 2015, O'Hagan published his fifth novel The Illuminations: A Novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

In June 2016, the London Review of Books published a 35,612-word essay by O'Hagan, titled "The Satoshi Affair: Andrew O'Hagan on the many lives of Satoshi Nakamoto", which followed the events surrounding programmer Craig Wright's claim to be bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakomoto.

In the article, O'Hagan describes how he was approached by Wright and, a group that he was associated with, in order to cover the exposure of Craig Wright's identity as Satoshi.

Though the article is inconclusive as to the true identity of Satoshi, some have taken it as evidence that Wright is a fraud.

In October 2017, O'Hagan published The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age which includes stories about his attempt to help Julian Assange write his memoirs, the author using the identity of a deceased man to make a new life on the Internet, and expanding on Craig Wright's claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

His most recent novel is Mayflies (2020), which won the Christopher Isherwood Prize.

In September 2020, O'Hagan published his sixth novel, Mayflies.

His essays, reports and stories have appeared in London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian and The New Yorker.

Four of O'Hagan's books have received adaptations into different media.