Simon Mawer

Simon Mawer, a critically acclaimed British fiction writer, is author of eight novels and two non fiction books. His latest novel, The Glass Room, published by Little, Brown in January, is shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and two other British prizes, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Wingate Prize. The next novel, provisionally entitled Trapeze, is underway. Mawer is also an accomplished essayist and he has published poetry in Eastern Europe. Born in England in 1948, Mawer grew up in England, Cyprus, and Malta. He went to boarding school at Millfield, In Somerset, UK and to the Oxford University, Brasenose College. His first publication was the novel, Chimera.  He currently teaches in Italy and lives near Rome with his wife Connie and their two children, Matthew and Julia. Of his background he says: “My father, like his father before him, served in the Royal Air Force. We lived the nomadic life of a typical military family, spending, amongst various moves in England, three years in Cyprus during the EOKA period and a total of five years in Malta. These experiences planted in me a love of the Mediterranean world which has lasted my whole life. They also gave me a taste for exile which I have never lost. When people ask me where I come from I am still unable to reply. I have lived in Italy for more than three decades, but Italy is not home. Home is where the mind is, perhaps. From the age of eight I was educated in boarding schools, an experience I loathed at first but later came to enjoy. Above all it forced upon me the need to preserve a secret, interior world in a society where privacy was at a premium, training that was surely significant in the development of a writer.”