John King (author)
| John King | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1960 |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Notable works | The Football Factory, Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk, White Trash, The Prison House, Skinheads, The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler |
| Website | |
| london-books |
|
John King is an English novelist who has written a number of books which, for the most part, deal in the more rebellious elements driving the country’s culture. His stories carry strong social and political undercurrents and his debut The Football Factory, published in 1996, was an instant word-of-mouth success, selling around 300,000 copies in the UK. The book was subsequently turned into a play by Brighton Theatre Events, with German and Dutch adaptations following. A high-profile film adaptation appeared in 2004. Directed by Nick Love and starring Danny Dyer, Dudley Sutton and Frank Harper, its UK DVD sales stand at nearly 2 million. Both novel and film attracted widespread media comment for their realism.
Prior to the novel’s release an early version of the chapter Millwall Away appeared in Rebel Inc. This magazine also published early writing by Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, and all three would subsequently join Jonathan Cape. King was producing the fanzine Two Sevens with Peter Mason at this time (Mason would go on to author The Brown Dog Affair, among other books), and Rebel Inc editor Kevin Williamson’s fiction was featured, along with interviews with Welsh and London novelist Stewart Home. Following its publication, extracts from The Football Factory featured in issue 59 of the New York literary journal Grand Street.
Two more novels – Headhunters and England Away – develop the themes of alienation and belonging to be found in The Football Factory. These three books form a loose trilogy with story lines found in The Football Factory and Headhunters converging in England Away. The Big Issue described Headhunters as: “Sexy, dirty, violent, sad and funny; in fact it has just about everything you could want from a book on contemporary working-class life in London”. Reviewing England Away, Chris Searle of The Morning Star wrote: “The words of Wilfred Owen come pounding through King’s prose: ‘I was the enemy you killed, my friend’.”
King's fourth novel – Human Punk – is believed to be his most autobiographical. Set in and around Slough, The Independent’s Gareth Evans wrote: “The long sentences and paragraphs build up cumulatively, with the sequences describing an end-of-term punch-up and the final canal visit just two virtuoso examples. These passages come close to matching the coiled energy of Hubert Selby’s prose, one of King’s keynote influences... In the resolution of the novel’s central, devastating act, there is an almost Shakespearean sense of a brief restoration of balance after the necessary bloodletting.”
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Wikipedia