Jonathan Coe - Career

Career

Coe has long been interested in both music and literature. 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. 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 2010, Coe has published nine novels.

Besides novels, Coe has written a biography of the experimental British novelist BS Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which 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 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. Both titles are published in Italy only, as La storia di Gulliver (2011) and Lo specchio dei desideri (2012).

A handwritten manuscript page from The Rotters' Club was displayed as part of the Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition, running at the British Library from 11 May-25 September 2012.

Coe was a judge for the Man 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.

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.

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.".