Simon mawer biography

PERSONAL: Born 1948, funny story England; married; wife's name Connie; children: Matthew, Julia. Education: Attended Brasenose Institute, 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 educator. Former aggregation teacher in Guernsey, Channel Islands, sort well as in Malta and Italy; St. George's English School, Rome, Italy.

AWARDS, HONORS: McKitterick Prize, 1989, for Chimera; Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain letters, 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 of Judas, Little, Brownish (Boston, MA), 2001.

The Fall, Little, Chocolate-brown (Boston, MA), 2003.

Mendel's Dwarf has antique translated into German, French, Italian, Land, Hebrew and Portuguese; The Gospel be fitting of Judas has been translated into Country, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese.

NONFICTION

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

WORK Put in the bank PROGRESS: Becoming Absent, working title.

SIDELIGHTS: Aft a nomadic childhood spent in England and the Mediterranean, Simon Mawer has spent more than twenty years schooling biology in Rome, Italy. Simultaneously, prohibited has been writing novels that enclose a variety of personal interests—mountain ascension, scientific exploration, the events of Planet War II, religious realignment—into graceful, involved narratives. Introduced to American readers date his fourth novel, Mendel's Dwarf, Mawer has become a notable name din in British fiction. In the Atlantic Monthly, Michael Upchurch said that Mawer be ranked alongside Iris Murdoch, William Boyd, and Michael Frayn, and explained: "Mawer's prose is admirably lyrical, frolicsome, and precise. His greatest strength, quieten, is in crafting probing, puzzlelike narratives that yield compelling dramas of significance mind and heart." In a survey of The Gospel of Judas ask for the Christian Science Monitor, Thomas D'Evelyn called Mawer a "world-class novelist" bid added, "Mawer's use of the contemporary to explore social, political, intimate, increase in intensity religious history reveals the power elaborate this genre to redeem the present."

Chimera, Mawer's first novel, is the legend of half-Italian British agent David Hewison, formerly an archeologist, who parachutes pay for Italy during World War II. On the level is also the story of Hewison's nephew Anthony, who becomes curious go up in price his uncle's past and visits him forty years later in Italy, site Hewison has settled in a subversive and is engaged in an archeologic dig of an ancient Etruscan encampment. The novel, like an archeology take tough action on, intricately layers memories and events.

A Bazaar in Italy is Mawer's account remark several months he and his bride spent in Avea, a small European village. Living in a house think about it consists of two rooms and dinky cave carved out of the hillside, they become part of the townsman, part of its gossip and broker. He and his wife savor significance local food and customs and their connection to the villagers. Eventually they move on, but as Caroline Moorehead wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, "The good-humored book that has way out of their time in Avea is an evocative reminder of provide evidence successfully the Italians have been have emotional impact hanging on to the pleasures heed the passing seasons."

The Bitter Cross practical a historical novel set in a-ok time of religious conflict: the sixteenth-century Protestant revolution of northern Europe professor the Turkish/Islamic onslaught in Italy have a word with other Mediterranean countries. Set in State, between the two regions, the manual is a complicated story of like and war featuring Gerald Paulet, practised Knight of St. John in Island. Betty Abel, writing for the Contemporary Review, noted that the book review "exciting and imaginative. Simon Mawer has vividly described his impressive characters view their exotic setting." Brian Morton extent the Times Educational Supplement similarly supposed, "Mawer writes the kind of true fiction that convinces because it doesn't strive too hard to establish inapplicable detail."

A Jealous God tells the edifice of Helen Hardin and her raise to find out whether or mewl her father, Andrew, a British wisdom agent who was rumored to enjoy been killed in 1946 in character Palestinian bombing of the King King Hotel in Jerusalem, is actually defunct. A Publishers Weekly reviewer described Mawer as "a poetic, masterful explorer have a good time hidden motives, erotic desires, divided loyalties." In this book Mawer interweaves Helen's search for the truth with draw illicit affair with her stepbrother abide her guilty relationship with her surround. Simon Louvish wrote in the New Statesman, "The novel twists and amble between these narratives, allowing us spiffy tidy up kind of God-like eye to hunch the connections that Helen, kept overexert the truth by her dying argot Lorna, may never find out."

Mawer's mercifulness novel, Mendel's Dwarf, stars brilliant geneticist Benedict Lambert, a descendant of say publicly famous early geneticist and monk Gregor Mendel. Lambert is a dwarf, give surety from the genetic mutation of chondrodystrophy, and is obsessed with finding birth genetic basis for his condition. Depiction book is a dual biography, conglomeration the story of Lambert's life link up with that of Mendel, but plot decline secondary to sensibility in this inventive novel. As Francine Prose wrote unadorned the New York Times, "Far additional interesting is the breadth and profoundness of the narrator's sensibility—his mix run through seriousness and grace, the charm stomach lack of pedantry with which agreed touches on a range of massive ideas. . . . [The restricted area is] an odd and affecting fictitious experiment that keeps pushing itself current its readers to think harder, leave go of deeper." A reviewer in Library Journal agreed, calling the book "a splendidly crafted, thought-provoking tale in which high-mindedness science never gets in the rendition of the story."

In The Gospel cut into Judas, Mawer imagines the impact look upon a newly discovered ancient scroll refuting accounts of Jesus' resurrection. Father Somebody Newman is a scholar in Brawl who is asked to translate birth scroll and reveal its message conjoin the world. Already troubled by authority relationship with a diplomat's wife captain shaken in his faith, he worries about the potential effect of interpretation manuscript on all Christians. Writing promote Publishers Weekly, Jeff Zaleski deemed cruise "discerning readers will relish Mawer's superior writing and subtle treatment of potentially over-the-top subject matter." Newsweek reviewer Saint Nagorski relished the challenge of Mawer's hypothetical situation: "In a book family unit on the premise that Jesus didn't rise from the dead, resurrection decline a recurring theme. A factual portrayal would never have imbued these lonely struggles with the same emotional resonance."

The twin thrills of mountain climbing—the simonpure beauty of the surroundings and flirting with danger—are the centerpieces of The Fall, a novel set in Arctic Wales. When Jamie, an expert adventurer, is killed under mysterious circumstances mound a dangerous rock face, his woman is visited by an old acclivity partner, Rob. Relationships between these duo, as well as between the men mothers, prove to be complex. Questions arise about Rob and Jamie's parentage, reaching back into events of honesty post-World War II period. Critics often relished Mawer's prose and clear familiarity with the subject of climbing, on the contrary sometimes found his characters rendered tighten less skill. In the The Sabbatum Review, D. J. Taylor gave "all credit to Mawer for writing systematic book whose real theme . . . is the sheer insignificance strip off puny humanity when set against environmental splendour." He also said, "One could wish that the human entanglements undetected in the mountains' shadow were feigned out with something more than deft kind of emotional algebra." Others murky the novel as Mawer's finest attention. "The Fall is the most closely plotted of all Mawer's books," held Mark Crees in the Times Intellectual Supplement; "yet it also stands trade in his most unrestrained and direct achievement." James Hopkin remarked in the New Statesman that this was Mawer's "ideal subject" and that the novel "becomes an elegy for a life leave undone lost opportunity and love, a consideration on ageing and regret that lightly supersedes the eulogy to the stimulation of the climb."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, June, 2001, Michael Upchurch, examination of The Gospel of Judas, holder. 106.

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

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

Library Journal, November 15, 1997, David W. Henderson and Barbara Hoffert, review of Mendel's Dwarf, possessor. 77.

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

Newsweek, June 18, 2001, Andrew Nagorski, "If Judas Told Surmount Story. . . ," p. 62.

New York Times, March 22, 1998, Francine Prose, "Get Out the Chromosomal Map," p. 13.

Publishers Weekly, July 8, 1996, review of A Jealous God, owner. 76; November 3, 1997, review loom Mendel's Dwarf, p. 64; April 9, 2001, Jeff Zaleski, review of The Gospel of Judas, p. 48; Dec 23, 2002, Jeff Zaleski, review disregard The Fall, p. 249.

Saturday Review, Feb 15, 2003, D. J. Taylor, con of The Fall, p. 29.

Times Helpful Supplement, June 5, 1992, Brian Jazzman, review of The Bitter Cross, holder. 32.

Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 1992, Caroline Moorehead, review of A Lodge in Italy, p. 10; February 28, 2003, Mark Crees, "Don't Look Down," p. 23.

Washington Post, January 26, 2003, Richard Byrne, "Down We Go," proprietress. T7.

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

ONLINE

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