Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe (born 19 August 1961) is an English novelist and writer.

His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire.

Coe was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, on 19 August 1961 to Roger and Janet (née Kay) Coe.

He studied at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge.

He taught at the University of Warwick, where he completed an MA and PhD in English Literature.

Coe has long been interested in both music and literature.

It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources that was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s.

In the mid-1980s he played with a band (The Peer Group) and tried to get a recording of his music.

He also wrote songs and played keyboards for a short-lived feminist cabaret group, Wanda and the Willy Warmers.

He published his first novel, The Accidental Woman, in 1987.

The Dwarves of Death (1990) was filmed as Five Seconds to Spare in 1999, for which Coe himself co-wrote the screenplay.

For example, What a Carve Up! (1994) reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name.

In 1994 his fourth novel What a Carve Up! won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France.

It was followed by The House of Sleep, which won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Novel award and, in France, the Prix Médicis.

As of 2022, Coe has published fourteen novels.

Both What a Carve Up! (1994) and The Rotters' Club (2001) have been adapted as drama serials for BBC Radio 4.

What a Carve Up! was adapted by David Nobbs.

Coe was a judge for the Booker Prize in 1996, and has been a jury member at the Venice Film Festival (in 1999, under the chairmanship of Emir Kusturica) and the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2007.

He had to wait until 2001 to make his first appearance on a record with 9th & 13th (Tricatel, 2001), a collection of readings of his work, set to music by jazz pianist/double bass player Danny Manners and indiepop artist Louis Philippe.

Coe is a lifelong fan of Canterbury progressive rock.

His novel The Rotters' Club is named after an album by Hatfield and the North.

He has contributed to the liner notes for that band's archival release Hatwise Choice.

He once said: "I'd love to find a pianist to collaborate with – maybe Alex Maguire, who is now playing with the reformed line-up of Hatfield and the North".

Besides novels, Coe has written a biography of the experimental British novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which D. J. Taylor described in Literary Review as "a deeply unconventional biography," won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005.

Also in 2005 Penguin published his "collected shorter prose", a volume consisting of only 55 pages, under the title 9th & 13th.

The Rotters' Club was adapted for television by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais and broadcast on BBC Two in January–February 2005.

Coe read an excerpt of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim to crowds at the Latitude Festival in July 2009.

The central character was to be "a product of the social media boom", and "the sort of person with hundreds of Facebook friends but no one to talk to when his marriage breaks up."

In fact this collaboration did come to fruition, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2009, where Maguire performed a suite of piano pieces to accompany readings from the novel The Rain Before It Falls.

Coe has also performed live with flautist Theo Travis.

Both titles are published in Italy only, as La storia di Gulliver (2011) and Lo specchio dei desideri (2012).

The same collection was published in France in 2012 under the title Désaccords imparfaits.

He has written a short children's adaptation of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and a children's story called The Broken Mirror.

A handwritten manuscript page from The Rotters' Club was displayed as part of the "Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands" exhibition that ran at the British Library during 2012.

In 2012 Coe was invited by Javier Marías to become a duke of the kingdom of Redonda.

He chose as his title "Duke of Prunes", after a favourite piece of music by Frank Zappa.

The Very Private Life of Mister Sim, a French film based on The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, directed by Michel Leclerc and produced by Delante Cinema and Kare Productions, was released on 16 December 2015.

Music is a constant thread in Coe's work.

He played music for years and tried to find a record label as a performer before becoming a published novelist.

Coe's 2019 book Middle England won the European Book Prize and also won the Costa Book Award in the Novel category.