John Lanchester Biography

John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He grew up in the Far East, but was educated in England. A former editor at the publishers Penguin, he is a member of the editorial board of the London Review of Books and is a regular contributor to several newspapers and magazines, including Granta, the New Yorker, The Observer, for whom he was restaurant critic, and the Daily Telegraph, for whom he writes a weekly column.

His first novel, the highly acclaimed The Debt to Pleasure (1996), is the erudite and unorthodox autobiography of sinister gourmet Tarquin Winot. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and an American prize, the Julia Child Award for 'literary food writing'. The novel has been translated into 20 languages. His second book, the novel Mr Phillips (2000), is an interior monologue narrating the inner thoughts and fantasies of a redundant 50-year-old accountant. Fragrant Harbour (2002), set in Hong Kong, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).

Lanchester's most recent works are Family Romance (2007) and Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010).

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