Rupert Thomson

Rupert Thomson FRSL (born 5 November 1955) is an English author.

Biography

Rupert Thomson was born on 5 November 1955 in Eastbourne, East Sussex, England. Following the sudden death of his mother, Rupert Thomson was educated as a boarder at Christ's Hospital School. At the age of seventeen, he was awarded a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. He worked as a copywriter in London from 1978 to 1982, before abandoning his job to write full-time.

Once described by the critic James Wood as "one of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction", and compared to writers as various as Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Charles Dickens, Elmore Leonard, and Mervyn Peake, he is the author of nine critically acclaimed novels. His fourth novel, The Insult, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of All Time. More recently, Death of a Murderer was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year.