Tony Parsons (British journalist)

Tony Victor Parsons (born 6 November 1953) is an English journalist, broadcaster, and author. He began his career as a music journalist on the NME, writing about punk music. Later, he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, before going on to write for Daily Mirror for 18 years. Since September 2013 he has written his current column for The Sun. Parsons was for a time a regular guest on the BBC Two arts review programme The Late Show, and still appears infrequently on the successor Newsnight Review; he also briefly hosted a series on Channel 4 called Big Mouth.

He is the author of the multi-million selling novel Man and Boy (1999). Parsons had written a number of novels including The Kids (1976), Platinum Logic (1981) and Limelight Blues (1983), before he found mainstream success by focusing on the tribulations of thirty-something men. Parsons has since published a series of best-selling novels – One For My Baby (2001), Man and Wife (2003), The Family Way (2004), Stories We Could Tell (2006), My Favourite Wife (2007), Starting Over (2009), Men From the Boys (2010), The Murder Bag (2014), and The Slaughter Man (2015). His novels typically deal with relationship problems, emotional dramas and the traumas of men and women in our time. He describes his writing as 'Men Lit', as opposed to the female 'Chick Lit'.

Born in Romford, Essex, he was the only child of working-class parents. He lived for the first five years of his life in a rented flat above a shop in Essex, before his family moved to their own council house in Billericay, Essex.

His father was a former Royal Naval Commando who won the Distinguished Service Medal in World War Two. After the war, he worked as a lorry driver, market trader and greengrocer. His mother was a school dinner lady. Parsons attended Barstable Grammar School, Basildon (now Barstable School), which he left aged 16 with 5 O-levels. He then worked in a series of low-paid, unskilled menial jobs. He then got a job with a city insurance company as a computer operator where his free time allowed him to develop his literary skills – publishing an underground paper called the Scandal Sheet.

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