Jon Courtenay Grimwood

1) Where do you live? And why?

House in Winchester and small flat in the centre of London. Winchester, because that's where we moved a couple of years ago after my son announced he wanted to go to sixth form there. The flat because we all got bored with trying to catch the last train back to Winchester and because my partner got offered a wizzy job in magazines and suddenly needed to be based in central London. Personally, I'd rather live in Marrakech and Paris, not least because then I wouldn't have to live in a country where Tony Blair is prime minister. 

2) Who's your favourite author?

Bulgakov… he had the misfortune to be Stalin's favourite author and in Master and Margarita wrote a mind-bending novel about a large cigar-smoking cat in Moscow, with a walk on part for Pontius Pilate as a man with a bad headache and Jesus as his faith healer. It about creativity, politics and the absurdity of expecting life to be normal. I read it in my teens and suddenly an awful lot of things began to make sense.

On another level, James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin, for combining brilliant writing with a genre framework. And yes, I've left out the whole of SF, largely because I'm not going to start choosing between friends.

3) What's the greatest influence on your writing?

My cat. He's give to stamping on the keyboard, trashing piles of script if I'm editing and ripping up carpet if I lock him out of the study. In extremis, if he really feels pissed off, he'll drag half-dead birds through the cat flap, the bigger the better. As a result, I've taken to working in a café most mornings. In the days before Winchester had anything resembling a decent Café Nero, I used to decant myself onto the Winchester-London train and work there.

4) Where were you born and raised?

Born in Valetta, looked after by nuns, because I was expected to die. Raised (loosely) in Malta, Jahore, Singapore and Norway. Flew back and forwards to school in England. Besides the smatterings of Arabic, Chinese Malay and Norwegian which I promptly forgot, this taught me to like airports and mistrust nationalism. Almost everything from back then goes straight into the books, but then so does everything from everyone else's childhoods, what I've eaten for lunch, that morning's news and pretty much anything else that sounds interesting. Writing seems to be about putting in everything that occurs and then remembering to take most of it out.

5) What is your philosophy for life?

If you don't like something, change it…

6) Did you enjoy school? What is your most vivid memory of your school years?

I was sent to boarding school at seven and got let out, with good behaviour, at eighteen. At times, it felt like my entire knowledge of this country was based around being incarcerated in the 19th Century bubble that is an English public school or being on a train or plane to somewhere else.

Perversely, I really enjoyed the early years and by eleven or twelve was a hardened little thug who thought boys who cried themselves to sleep pathetic. Things only started to unravel in the sixth when I decided there was nothing wrong with my school that couldn't be cured with a sub-machine gun and unlimited ammunition (luckily all the guns were kept locked in the armoury).

Vivid memories? Dozens, most unrepeatable. Among the better ones, climbing out of an upstairs window aged nine, walking along a ledge and climbing in through another window… And sleeping on a beach, aged about seventeen, with a fire for company, the sound of the waves behind me and an utterly black sky. I'm told I destroyed a room on my very first night at boarding school, but I don't remember this.

7) Name your top 5 pieces of music.

Marquee Moon - Television
Ya Bey - Dhafer Youssef
Closing Time - Leonard Cohen
Romeo had Juliette - Lou Reed
Cafe del mar - Energy 52 (pretty much any mix)

8) What were the first pieces of writing that you produced? e.g. short stories, school magazine etc.

Aged eight and dyslexic, I began writing a novel about a monkey who stole a NASA spaceship and escaped to the moon to live by himself. As the writing bit was too hard I ended up drawing everything except the first two chapters.

9) What jobs did you have before you started writing?

Usual stuff, worked in the kitchens at Oslo airport, had a job smashing up blocks of wax in a factory, student stuff… Then went into publishing, headed up a production department, swapped to editorial, became publisher, got bought, asset stripped and spent two years dead for tax reasons at Cassell, escaped, wrote for Guardian and Indie, Maxim, Esquire and various others, turned the journalism into fiction and began to publish novels.

10) Tell us about your best or worst holiday experience

Worst… In Italy, years ago, I ran into a group of Italians on a beach outside Rome, spent the evening with them and then as darkness came in decided I needed somewhere to crash. So, the group breaking up, I found an empty garage, unrolled my sleeping bag and settled down in the entrance.

An hour or two later I was woken by headlights, the screech of brakes and a very shaken-middle aged Italian who'd almost run me over with his very large Mercedes. Luckily, he was so relieved not to have killed me that he forgot to be upset about my using his garage to sleep.

11) What is the most embarrassing thing that has happened to you?


Walking along a railway platform at night and surprising a girl taking a piss behind a bin. We then had to ignore each other as politely as possible for the time it took our train to arrive, and she was almost in rigid with embarrassment by the time it did. I tend not to get embarrassed for myself. Other people's embarrassment I feel quite strongly.

12) How do you write each novel i.e. do you block out the narrative first, take each page at a time, create the central character, build a cast of characters?

I write every book three times, first draft to get the story, second draft to sort out the plot points, third draft to make sure the language works. As a result I can finish the first draft of something and still not know who committed the murder or why something happened. I always write a chapter breakdown first, before this, and draw up a list of characters. I'm also fond of drawing myself maps and pictures of places, buying the local music (traditional, rock and dance) and cooking the food to get a grip on how it tastes. You can tell a lot about a culture by looking at what people eat.

13) What is a typical writing day?

Get up, go to café, drink coffee, check e-mail, drink more coffee, sigh, think about book, drink more coffee, make myself start writing, look up and discover that half the day has gone, my coffee's cold and the people around me have changed seven times while I've been lost in the plot.

That's the ideal. It leaves out all the time spent reading proofs, arguing with US editors about use of English, explaining to Polish translators who Admiral Nelson was and answering idiot questionnaires.

14) What do you do when you are not writing? How do you relax? What are your hobbies?

I'm not sure writers ever have time when they're not writing or at least not thinking about writing. Life gets taken over by characters, what happens next, sorting out plot points and dealing with the fact that killing the hero's sister in chapter three was a really crap idea because she's just walked back in for chapter seven. And I relax, either by working, however perverse that sounds, or by blasting round the back lanes on my Triumph Bonneville. I find planes relaxing as well, also good places to work.