British Author (1969-)
Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976 where his father was working as a curate, but grew up in Norfolk. He spent most of his childhood in Norwich until the age of twelve when his family moved to Thetford in south Norfolk. He studied Media Technology and Production at Bradford university and after graduating in 1998 went to live in Sheffield where he was employed in a series of shift-work jobs in a bakery, a textile factory and at the Post Office. After a year spent in Sheffield he moved to Nottingham with his wife, Alice, a mental health worker and found a part-time job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant.
He began writing short stories and poetry while still a student at Bradford University, his first published work was a series entitled Cinema 100 published by Pulp Faction in an anthology called Five Uneasy Pieces in 1998; his short stories The First Punch and What the Sky Sees appeared in Granta magazine, while another titled While You Were Sleeping was broadcast on Radio 4.
His first novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things which tells the day in the life of the inhabitants of a single street, was published in 2002, received a rave review from Erica Wagner in The Times, who called it "a dream of a novel", but was otherwise ignored until it appeared on the longlist for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. Although his book failed to progress any further in the Booker contest it went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. His second novel So Many Ways To Begin, the story of one man’s life employed as the curator of a Coventry Museum appeared in 2006.
Bibliography
References
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=authD4F18F621142f1BABAIiP1854743
http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2002/story/0,12350,777549,00.html
http://www.bloomsbury.com/authors/microsite.asp?id=206