Exhibit X: Readings in New Fiction at Hallwalls

"Britain's brightest young writer."
—The Guardian

"[Lawrence Norfolk is] just about ahead of everyone in his generation of novelists."
—The Observer

"If Norfolk's first novel were indeed a dictionary, its first entries might well be accomplished, ambitious, and audacious. On one level this is a richly textured historical novel set at the end of the 18th century in London, Paris , and the Channel Islands. At the same time it subverts our expectations, revealing 'history' as a vast conspiracy whose workings are both mysterious and inevitable. At its center is John Lempriere, a (real) figure whose 1788 dictionary of mythology insists on springing to gruesome life. An army of cabalists and automatons, a virtual bureaucracy of the damned, plotting apocalypse, are ranged against him. Dauntingly elusive and allusive, but highly recommended for readers of Eco and Fowles."
—Grove Koger

Lawrence Norfolk is the author of three historical novels which have together sold over a million copies and been translated into thirty-four languages. Born in London in 1963, Norfolk moved with his parents to Iraq in the following year. Evacuated following the Six Day War in 1967, he grew up in the West Country of England.

Author of Lempriére's Dictionary, The Pope's Rhinoceros, and In the Shape of a Boar, and co-author of Ott's Sneeze, he is currently writing a novel set in 17th-century England during the Civil War. Norfolk is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Budapest Festival Prize for Literature. His work has been short-listed for the Impac Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Award, and the Wingate/Jewish Quarterly Prize for Literature. In 1992 he was listed as one of Granta magazine's "Twenty Best Young British Writers."

Norfolk's journalism has appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout Europe and America. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio Four's Saturday Review and Front Row, and BBC Radio Three's Nightwaves. He lives in London with his wife and two sons.

Some publications related to this event:
April, 2008 - 2008