Nicholas Shakespeare

Born in 1957 to a diplomat Shakespeare grew up in the far east and in South America. He was educated at Cambridge and worked as a journalist. From 1989 to 1991 he was literary editor for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

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His time in South America is represented in two novels, The Vision of Elena Silves (1989, Somerset Maugham Award) and The Dancer Upstairs (1995, American Library Association Award). Other less well known novels from this period are The Men Who Would Be King (1984), Londoners (1986) and The High Flyer (1993). In 1999 Shakespeare published his biography of Bruce Chatwin to widespread critical acclaim. This was followed by the novel Snowleg (2004) and a travel book, In Tasmania (2005).

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Shakespeare has also produced two extended biographies for television, one on Bruce Chatwin and the other on actor Dirk Bogard (Arena 2001, BAFTA Best Documentary). The Dancer Upstairs was made into a film in 2003 for which Shakespeare wrote the screenplay and John Malkovic directed. Shakespeare was nominated as one of Granta?s ?Best of British Young Novelists? in 1993 and has written articles for Granta, the London Review of Books and National Geographic among others.

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Shakespeare?s novels place ordinary people against a background of significant events, as with The Dancer Upstairs, which deals with Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru?s Sendero Luminoso; and Snowleg, set partly during the cold war in the GDR.

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