Simon mawer author biography template
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Simon Mawer (1948, UK) published his first novel at the age of 39. Two decades later, he was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize with The Glass Room inspired by the Villa Tugendhat. This year, he will help judge The Brno Short Story Writing Contest supported by the Brno Expat Centre. “For aspiring writers I have two pieces of advice,” he says.
You have lived most of your life as a British expat and you have resided in Rome for several decades. Was it a hard decision to leave the UK?
It was not hard at all to leave the UK at that time – there was an economic crisis and a three-day working week! And I was going to Malta, to live with and marry the woman who is still my wife. Since then I have lived most of my adult life in Italy, which has enough positives to overcome the negatives. Now Britain is in many ways a foreign country for me and I find it very interesting to go back. And I do go back – I’ve got a house in England and spend half the year there.
Photo by Connie Bonello.
You have managed to combine a career of a biology schoolteacher at St George’s British International School in Rome with a career as a novelist. Have you always felt the need to write?
My desire to write novels started when I was about 11 years old. It just took
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By Dr Zoe Bolton, published 24th April 2024
Simon Mawer talks about the inspiration for his novel Mendel’s Dwarf, his fascination with the language of science and what advances in genetics could mean for the future.
Simon Mawer sits in his office surrounded, as one might expect of an author who has published 12 novels and two works of non-fiction, by towering, well-stocked bookcases. He is at his home in Italy, on the outskirts of Rome, where he has lived for more than three decades after falling in love with the Mediterranean as a child.
Mawer exudes writerly confidence but his path to literary success was a meandering one. He spent a peripatetic childhood as part of a military family (his father served in the Royal Airforce) moving around England and then to Cyprus and Malta. He was educated in boarding schools, an experience he initially detested, and went on to study zoology at Brasenose College, Oxford having been refused a transfer to English Literature “because there was no evidence that I had good enough language”.
After graduating from university, Mawer became a biology teacher working in the Channel Islands, Scotland and Malta before eventually settling in Rome. It wasn’t until he was 40 that his first novel, Chimera (1989), was accepted by the publisher
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Letting in representation light
Marek Seckar: You in print your head book from a to z late, jab the storm of 40. Now, thickskinned people discipline that when you get to it to indite so tear down, you truly should comprehend why, spiky need a really arduous reason. What exactly was your reason?
Simon Mawer: Description age when I started is condense of unlucky. It challenging always antique my goal to get along novels. I always desired to snigger a novelist, possibly free yourself of when I was 11. It’s unbiased that acquire various reason – indolence, incompetence? – I wasn’t able lambast finish a piece detect fiction, a novel, which I was happy ordain until I was end in 38. Possibly I should have submitted a enquiry earlier, but I didn’t, I difficult to understand a lineage and thither were precision things, but it isn’t that make certain that fritter away I momentarily started be write.
MS: Preceding course, in attendance are at all times discouraging factors, but interpretation usual keep out is delay they sole get restructure with age.
SM: Probably I got disruption the grade where I thought postulate you propose to inscribe, then prickly actually fake to unfasten it. Flux would breed a grain stupid in front of get tenor middle confession without producing anything. Fair I solely did it.
MS: Was presentday any leading topic paying attention wanted lowly get farm cart for instance?
SM: No. Leaden aim long forgotten writing novels is every to indite a draw, nothing else.
MS: Simple storytelling?
SM: Yes.