About
This is the official website of the writer James Lasdun, and the only reliably accurate source of information about his work.
James Lasdun was born in London in 1958 and now lives in the US. He is a poet, fiction writer and screen writer.
His first book of short stories, The Silver Age (1985), won a Dylan Thomas Award, and was followed by ‘Three Evenings’ (1992) and the selection, The Siege (1999), the title story of which was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci (’Beseiged’). His most recent book is also a collection of short stories, It’s Beginning to Hurt (2009)
His poetry collections are A Jump Start (1987); The Revenant (1995); and Landscape with Chainsaw (2001). This book was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and named as one of the Times Literary Supplement’s International Books of the Year.
His first novel was The Horned Man (2002), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and an Economist Best Book of the Year, and was followed by a second novel, Seven Lies (2006). This book was longlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
James Lasdun also co-edited After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994) with Michael Hofmann, and wrote the non-fiction books Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria (1997) and Walking and Eating in Provence (2008)with his wife, Pia Davis. His co-screenwriting credits include Sunday, which won both Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, and Signs and Wonders, which starred Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgaard. His work has been widely translated.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowhip in Poetry in 1997, won the TLS/Blackwells poetry competition in 1999 and in 2006 won the first National Short Story Competition with his story, ‘An Anxious Man’.
His most recent book is the short story collection It’s Beginning to Hurt (see page below).