Graham Swift

Novelist Graham Swift was born in London in 1949. He was educated at Dulwich College, Queens' College, Cambridge, and York University. He was nominated as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' in the Book Marketing Council's promotion in 1983.

He is the author of six novels. The first, The Sweet Shop Owner (1980), is narrated by disillusioned shopkeeper Willy Chapman, and unfolds over the course of a single day in June. The narrator of his second novel, Shuttlecock (1981), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, becomes obsessed with his father's experiences during the Second World War.

Waterland, his acclaimed third novel, was published in 1983. Narrated by history teacher Tom Crick, it describes his youth spent in the Norfolk fens during the Second World War. These personal memories are woven into a greater history of the area, slowly revealing the seeds of a family legacy that threatens his marriage. The book won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. It was followed by Out of this World (1988), the story of a photojournalist and his estranged daughter, and Ever After (1992).

Swift's most recent novel, Last Orders (1996), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), recounts a journey begun in a pub in London's East End by four friends intent on fulfilling a promise to scatter the ashes of their dead drinking-partner in the sea. A film adaptation of the novel starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins was first screened in 2001. His new novel, The Light of Day (2003), is the story of a murder, a love affair and a disgraced former policeman turned private detective.

Graham Swift is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.

''The Light of Day is as close to seeming spoken as any novel I have read. Time and time again the reader notices with what precision Swift ventriloquises his ordinary narrator. The book's pleasures teach you the art of reading slowly and carefully, of maturing with the story...a novel of solemn depths.'' James Woods, in the London Review of Books.
 
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