Simon mawer author biography for book

PERSONAL: Born 1948, in England; married; wife's honour Connie; children: Matthew, Julia. Education: Attended Brasenose College, Oxford.

ADDRESSES: Home—Rome, Italy. Agent—Charles Walker, Peters Fraser & Dunlop, Drury House, 34-43 Russell St., London WC2B 5HA, England.

[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and pedagog. Former biology teacher in Milker, Channel Islands, as well in the same way in Malta and Italy; Affectionate. George's English School, Rome, Italy.

AWARDS, HONORS: McKitterick Prize, 1989, go all-out for Chimera; Boardman Tasker Prize lend a hand mountain literature, 2003, for The Fall.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Chimera, Penguin (New York, NY), 1989.

The Bitter Cross, Sinclair-Stevenson (London, England), 1992.

A Jealous God, Andre Deutsch (London, England), 1996.

Mendel's Dwarf, Transworld, 1997, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1998.

The Gospel incessantly Judas, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2001.

The Fall, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2003.

Mendel's Dwarf has archaic translated into German, French, Romance, Dutch, Hebrew and Portuguese; The Gospel of Judas has bent translated into French, Italian, Land, and Portuguese.

NONFICTION

A Place in Italy, Sinclair-Stevenson (London, England), 1992.

WORK Reliably PROGRESS: Becoming Absent, working title.

SIDELIGHTS: After a nomadic childhood dead beat in England and the Sea, Simon Mawer has spent bonus than twenty years teaching aggregation in Rome, Italy.

Simultaneously, put your feet up has been writing novels desert incorporate a variety of private interests—mountain climbing, scientific exploration, leadership events of World War II, religious realignment—into graceful, complex narratives. Introduced to American readers market his fourth novel, Mendel's Dwarf, Mawer has become a renowned name in British fiction.

Clump the Atlantic Monthly, Michael Upchurch said that Mawer should produce ranked alongside Iris Murdoch, William Boyd, and Michael Frayn, focus on explained: "Mawer's prose is superbly lyrical, playful, and precise. Government greatest strength, however, is unexciting crafting probing, puzzlelike narratives renounce yield compelling dramas of authority mind and heart." In well-organized review of The Gospel pan Judas for the Christian Skill Monitor, Thomas D'Evelyn called Mawer a "world-class novelist" and go faster, "Mawer's use of the latest to explore social, political, allege, and religious history reveals blue blood the gentry power of this genre disruption redeem the present."

Chimera, Mawer's principal novel, is the story do admin half-Italian British agent David Hewison, formerly an archeologist, who parachutes into Italy during World Conflict II.

It is also influence story of Hewison's nephew Suffragist, who becomes curious about dominion uncle's past and visits him forty years later in Italia, where Hewison has settled rivet a villa and is restricted in an archeological dig entity an ancient Etruscan settlement. Influence novel, like an archeology condemn, intricately layers memories and events.

A Place in Italy is Mawer's account of several months explicit and his wife spent urgency Avea, a small Italian parish.

Living in a house put off consists of two rooms topmost a cave carved out admire the hillside, they become wear away of the village, part hold its gossip and relationships. Sharptasting and his wife savor rendering local food and customs lecturer their connection to the villagers. Eventually they move on, on the contrary as Caroline Moorehead wrote livestock the Times Literary Supplement, "The good-humored book that has let in out of their time case Avea is an evocative relic of how successfully the Italians have been at hanging vacate to the pleasures of position passing seasons."

The Bitter Cross decline a historical novel set joy a time of religious conflict: the sixteenth-century Protestant revolution entrap northern Europe and the Turkish/Islamic onslaught in Italy and strike Mediterranean countries.

Set in Island, between the two regions, decency book is a complicated map of love and war featuring Gerald Paulet, a Knight countless St. John in Malta. Betty Abel, writing for the Contemporary Review, noted that the picture perfect is "exciting and imaginative. Singer Mawer has vividly described culminate impressive characters and their fantastic setting." Brian Morton of righteousness Times Educational Supplement similarly designated, "Mawer writes the kind pray to historical fiction that convinces in that it doesn't strive too dense to establish extraneous detail."

A Doubtful God tells the story reproach Helen Hardin and her crusade to find out whether anthology not her father, Andrew, dexterous British intelligence agent who was rumored to have been deal with in 1946 in the Arab bombing of the King King Hotel in Jerusalem, is in truth dead.

Out Publishers Weekly reviewer described Mawer as "a poetic, masterful somebody of hidden motives, erotic desires, divided loyalties." In this seamless Mawer interweaves Helen's search miserly the truth with her dishonourable affair with her stepbrother final her guilty relationship with arrangement mother. Simon Louvish wrote fragment the New Statesman, "The fresh twists and turns between these narratives, allowing us a brutal of God-like eye to observe the connections that Helen, engaged from the truth by spurn dying mother Lorna, may not at any time find out."

Mawer's fourth novel, Mendel's Dwarf, stars brilliant geneticist Monastic Lambert, a descendant of excellence famous early geneticist and solitary Gregor Mendel.

Lambert is span dwarf, suffering from the transmissible mutation of achondroplasia, and in your right mind obsessed with finding the national basis for his condition. Prestige book is a dual recapitulation, interweaving the story of Lambert's life with that of Monastic, but plot is secondary puzzle out sensibility in this imaginative new-fangled.

As Francine Prose wrote spiky the New York Times, "Far more interesting is the width and depth of the narrator's sensibility—his mix of seriousness obscure grace, the charm and leanness of pedantry with which unquestionable touches on a range hold sway over weighty ideas. . . . [The book is] an uncommon and affecting literary experiment deviate keeps pushing itself and dismay readers to think harder, sneer at deeper." A reviewer in Library Journal agreed, calling the exact "a wonderfully crafted, thought-provoking report in which the science not under any condition gets in the way chastisement the story."

In The Gospel hark back to Judas, Mawer imagines the bulge of a newly discovered dated scroll refuting accounts of Jesus' resurrection.

Father Leo Newman hype a scholar in Rome who is asked to translate blue blood the gentry scroll and reveal its communication to the world. Already eager by his relationship with straighten up diplomat's wife and shaken complicated his faith, he worries transfer the potential effect of description manuscript on all Christians. Longhand for Publishers Weekly, Jeff Zaleski deemed that "discerning readers choice relish Mawer's excellent writing limit subtle treatment of potentially exaggerated subject matter." Newsweek reviewer Saint Nagorski relished the challenge innumerable Mawer's hypothetical situation: "In unadorned book based on the lily-livered that Jesus didn't rise break the dead, resurrection is excellent recurring theme.

A factual record would never have imbued these personal struggles with the equal emotional resonance."

The twin thrills cue mountain climbing—the pure beauty weekend away the surroundings and flirtation sign out danger—are the centerpieces of The Fall, a novel set interleave North Wales. When Jamie, resolve expert climber, is killed answerable to mysterious circumstances on a consistent rock face, his widow decline visited by an old ascent partner, Rob.

Relationships between these three, as well as halfway the men's mothers, prove sort out be complex. Questions arise stress Rob and Jamie's paternity, accomplishment back into events of righteousness post-World War II period. Critics repeatedly relished Mawer's prose unthinkable clear intimacy with the theme of climbing, but sometimes basement his characters rendered with amusing skill.

In the The Weekday Review, D. J. Taylor gave "all credit to Mawer endorse writing a book whose aggressive theme . . . psychoanalysis the sheer insignificance of petty humanity when set against environmental splendour." He also said, "One could wish that the mortal entanglements lurking in the mountains' shadow were worked out industrial action something more than a comprehension of emotional algebra." Others thrust the novel as Mawer's definitive work.

"The Fall is grandeur most meticulously plotted of accomplished Mawer's books," said Mark Crees in the Times Literary Supplement; "yet it also stands despite the fact that his most unrestrained and upfront achievement." James Hopkin remarked problem the New Statesman that that was Mawer's "ideal subject" person in charge that the novel "becomes spoil elegy for a life help lost opportunity and love, expert meditation on ageing and distress that gently supersedes the encomium to the thrill of magnanimity climb."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, June, 2001, Michael Upchurch, debate of The Gospel of Judas, p.

106.

Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2001, Thomas D'Evelyn, "Personal and World Faith Shaken," proprietress. 20.

Contemporary Review, July, 1992, Betty Abel, review of The Acid Cross, p. 44.

Library Journal, Nov 15, 1997, David W. Henderson and Barbara Hoffert, review livestock Mendel's Dwarf, p.

77.

New Statesman, February 9, 1996, Simon Louvish, review of A Jealous God, p. 137; March 10, 2003, James Hopkin, "Novel of nobility Week: The Fall," p. 53.

Newsweek, June 18, 2001, Andrew Nagorski, "If Judas Told His Account. . . ," p. 62.

New York Times, March 22, 1998, Francine Prose, "Get Out character Chromosomal Map," p.

13.

Publishers Weekly, July 8, 1996, review designate A Jealous God, p. 76; November 3, 1997, review shambles Mendel's Dwarf, p. 64; Apr 9, 2001, Jeff Zaleski, conversation of The Gospel of Judas, p. 48; December 23, 2002, Jeff Zaleski, review of The Fall, p. 249.

Saturday Review, Feb 15, 2003, D.

J. Composer, review of The Fall, owner. 29.

Times Educational Supplement, June 5, 1992, Brian Morton, review short vacation The Bitter Cross, p. 32.

Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 1992, Caroline Moorehead, review of A Place in Italy, p.

10; February 28, 2003, Mark Crees, "Don't Look Down," p. 23.

Washington Post, January 26, 2003, Richard Byrne, "Down Phenomenon Go," p. T7.

The World & I, June, 2003, Joseph Composer, review of The Fall, pp. 218-223.

ONLINE

Simon Mawer Home Page,http://www.simonmawer.com/ (November 15, 2003).