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Jonathan Coe

November 2024

  • Jonathan Coe, novelist, photographed at the Guardian Photo Studios in London. Jonathan Coe is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! (1994) reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources that was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s. Jonathan Coe 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 2022, Coe has published fourteen novels. Besides novels, Coe has written a biography of the experimental British novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which D. J. Taylor described in Literary Review as "a deeply unconventional biography," 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 that ran at the British Library during 2012. Coe was a judge for the 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." Coe's 2019 book Middle England won the European Book Prize and also won the Costa Book Award in the Novel category.

    Book of the day
    The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe review – a blue murder mystery

    Set during Liz Truss’s premiership, Coe’s multilayered study of how things quickly fell apart is a whodunnit with a villain hiding in plain sight
  • woman reading a book in an armchair

    ‘It will renew your faith in humanity’: books to bring comfort in dark times

    The best literary comfort reads rebuild our strength so we can face reality, argues novelist Francesca Segal. She picks her ultimate reading list – with help from Nick Hornby, Sathnam Sanghera and Naomi Alderman
  • Cambridge college

    Book of the day
    The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe review – ingenious cosy crime spoof

    This tricksy caper ranges from 1980s Cambridge to the rise and fall of Liz Truss with entertaining results

September 2024

  • ‘We don’t just have to stand by quietly.’

    Jonathan Coe and Kit de Waal among 35 writers of ‘protest zine’ defending threatened Birmingham libraries

    Launched by poet Liz Berry and novelist Catherine O’Flynn, pieces for each of the city’s 35 branch libraries speak against a ‘tidal wave of market forces’

June 2024

  • Summer reading 2024

    Your holiday reading list: chosen by Zadie Smith, David Nicholls and more

    Leading authors including Bernardine Evaristo, Armistead Maupin and Alice Roberts recommend books to read this summer

August 2023

  • Jonathan Coe, novelist, photographed at the Guardian Photo Studios in London.

    Books interview
    Jonathan Coe: ‘People say, where’s the anger? It’s still there’

  • illustration of tourists in new york

    ‘Can I bring my switch?’: A family holiday throws up existential questions

June 2023

  • David Nicholls, Sara Collins, Richard Osman, Zadie Smith, Mick Herron, Maggie O'Farrell

    Summer books: Zadie Smith, Ian Rankin, Richard Osman and others pick their favourites

    Leading authors recommend the best recent books, from a forbidden love affair at the Western Front to a murder mystery set in Egypt

December 2022

  • Composite image of Giancarlo Esposito and Bryan Cranston

    Down the rabbit hole
    What links Netflix’s Kaleidoscope to Jonathan Coe and Bryan Cranston?

    A chain of connections that starts and finishes with the random-order eight-part crime thriller

November 2022

  • A street party to celebrate Charles and Diana's 1981 wedding.

    Book of the day
    Bournville by Jonathan Coe review – a bittersweet slice of Britishness

    Coe is a compassionate witness to key moments in the life of a family and a nation

October 2022

  • British writer Jonathan Coe in Barcelona<br>epa09763184 British writer Jonathan Coe poses during the presentation of his lates work 'Mr Wilder And Me' in Barcelona, Spain, 16 February 2022. EPA/Quique Garcia

    Bournville by Jonathan Coe review – hugely impressive state-of-the-nation tale

  • Jonathan Coe

    Jonathan Coe: ‘We’re a nation driven by emotion and not by reason’

June 2022

  • 1978 photo of Billy Wilder in a hat next to Michael York, being hugged by Marthe Keller in a tiara

    How the acclaimed Billy Wilder tried and failed to snub Hollywood

    The new film Mr Wilder & Me reveals how a search for funding led the director on an uneasy journey back to the central Europe he fled

July 2021

  • Jonathan Coe.

    Jonathan Coe on The Rotters’ Club: ‘My diary provided endless material, but I didn’t like the person I was’

    The author on mixing semi-fact with fiction – and the school rule about swimming naked that inspired the novel’s big comedy set piece

June 2021

  • Billy Wilder in 1969.

    In brief: Black Water Sister; Mr Wilder & Me; Teach Yourself to Sleep – reviews

    A graduate is haunted by the voice of her grandmother, Jonathan Coe examines fame through a film director, and Kate Mikhail wants to send us to sleep

November 2020

  • From left: Okechukwu Nzelu, Arctic, Animal Crossing, Prince, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, Fred Astaire

    Lockdown culture
    Culture to cheer you up during the second lockdown: part one

    As parts of the UK enters another month – at least – of being stuck indoors, our critics pick out top music, games, books, TV, dance and art fixes to lift your spirits
  • Michael York and Marthe Keller in Wilder’s 1978 film, Fedora.

    Book of the day
    Mr Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe review – the director's cut

    A young woman finds herself on the set of Billy Wilder’s 1978 film Fedora, in Coe’s love letter to the spirit of cinema
  • Outrageously offensive ... Josephine Winshaw-Eaves, played by Fiona Button in What a Carve Up!

    Lockdown culture
    What a Carve Up! review – ingenious and gripping reimagining of Coe's novel

    Beginning at the end, Jonathan Coe’s novel about the scheming Winshaws is turned into an audacious investigative whodunnit

October 2020

  • ‘Everything comes back to Wilder’ … Jonathan Coe.

    Jonathan Coe: 'It’s the point in your life at which you start asking yourself, what next?'

  • Harbour busy with people and boats, ferry ship boarding, Kos, Greece 1970s<br>2BN3RF7 Harbour busy with people and boats, ferry ship boarding, Kos, Greece 1970s

    Mr Wilder & Me by Jonathan Coe review – satisfyingly sweeping

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