David Peace

David Peace (born 1967) is an English writer. Known for his novels Red Riding Quartet (1999-2002), GB84 (2004), and The Damned Utd (2006), Peace was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in their 2003 list. Peace, however, attracted unwanted attention for The Damned Utd when Johnny Giles, whom Peace had used as one of the characters in the book, successfully sued him for libel in the High Court in 2008.

David Peace grew up in Ossett, West Yorkshire. He was educated at Batley Grammar School, Wakefield College and Manchester Polytechnic, which he left in 1991 to go to Istanbul to teach English. He moved to Tokyo in 1994 and returned to the UK in 2009. He went back to Tokyo in 2011, because he found it hard to write in Britain.

The Red-Riding Quartet comprises the novels Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002). The books deal with police corruption, and are set against a backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders between 1975 and 1980. They feature several recurring characters. Red Riding, a three-part TV adaptation of the series, aired on Channel 4 in the UK in 2009. The cast includes Sean Bean, Andrew Garfield and Rebecca Hall.

Peace followed the quartet with GB84 (2004). This is a fictional portrayal of the year of the UK miners' strike (1984–1985). It describes the insidious workings of the British government and MI5, the coalfield battles, the struggle for influence in government and the dwindling powers of the National Union of Mineworkers. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature in 2005.

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