Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe
At Humber Mouth Festival on 19 June 2006
Born	(1961-08-19) 19 August 1961 (age 55) Bromsgrove, England, UK
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	British
Period	1987–present
Genre	Satire

Jonathan Coe (/koʊ/; born 19 August 1961) is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources which some feel was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s. One claim to fame that Coe has is writing the longest sentence in the literature of the English language, one that appeared in The Rotters' Club and appears to hold the record at 13,955 words (ahead of James Joyce's soliloquy by Molly Bloom in Ulysses).

Coe was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. He was born on 19 August 1961 to Roger and Janet (née Kay) Coe. He studied at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge. He taught at the University of Warwick, where he completed an MA and PhD in English Literature.

Coe has long been interested in both music and literature. In the mid-1980s he played with a band (The Peer Group) and tried to get a recording of his music. He also wrote songs and played keyboards for a short-lived feminist cabaret group, Wanda and the Willy Warmers.

He published his first novel, The Accidental Woman, in 1987. In 1994 his fourth novel What a Carve Up! won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It was followed by The House of Sleep which won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Novel award and, in France, the Prix Médicis. As of 2016, Coe has published eleven novels.